Black and White 2 v.1.2 Performance Update

Test Setup

We wanted to get a sense of how well the latest high-end hardware could run this game, but we also wanted to have older budget and midrange cards included in our performance tests for comparison. We included as many cards from both ATI and NVIDIA as we could in order to understand the game's overall playability, particularly after the 1.2 update.

We broke down the performance tests into 3 groups. For the high-end card tests, we enabled "High Antialiasing" (basically 4xAA with some tweaks and optimizations) and used the four resolutions tested on the last page (2048x1536, 1920x1440, 1600x1200, 1280x1024). The following cards make up the high-end group:

NVIDIA 7900 GTX
NVIDIA 7900 GT
NVIDIA 7800 GTX (512)
NVIDIA 7800 GT
ATI X1900 XT-X
ATI X1900 XT
ATI X1800 XL

In the midrange group we tested the game at 1600x1200, 1280x1024, and 1024x768 without AA enabled. Here are the cards we in this group:

NVIDIA 7800 GT
NVIDIA 7600 GT
NVIDIA 6800 GS
NVIDIA 6600 GT
ATI X1800 XL
ATI X1800 GTO
ATI X1600 XT

Note that the 7800 GT and X1800 XL are borderline high-end/midrange, so we tested these two cards in both categories. If you're wondering how some of the other "high-end" cards fare without AA, you can use them as a guide. We also included X1800 GTO numbers, and we are starting to see a few of these parts available for purchase.

For the low-end tests, we tested at 1280x1024, 1024x768, 800x600, and 640x480 without AA. These are the cards for this group:

NVIDIA 7300 GS
NVIDIA 6200 TC (TurboCache)
ATI X1300

Our test system was equipped as follows:

ATI Radeon Express 200 based system
NVIDIA nForce 4 based system
AMD Athlon 64 FX-57
2x 1GB DDR400 2:3:2:8
120 GB Seagate 7200.7 HD
600 W OCZ PowerStream PSU

Note that sound was disabled for all tests.