AMD and Dragon Age: Beginning of Collaboration.
A Brief Illustrated Report on Dragon Age Testing with the Latest AMD Technologies.
February 4, on Good Friday....
(for those who don't know, there is a Friday weekly calendar:
Day 1 - Anti-Friday,
Day 2 - Non-Friday,
Day 3 - Soon-Friday,
Day 4 - Little Friday,
Day 5 - Great Friday,
Day 6 - PopoWide Friday,
Day 7 - Deep Friday)
So, on Great Friday, representatives of the Dragon Age: Origins blog, Darrggon and Viviane, visited the blog... I mean the AMD office to test the game in conditions close to fabulous. In other words, just magnificent.
First and foremost - the game itself.
No problem that the distribution is in English. With the right files, this issue can be easily fixed.
So, Dragon Age: Origins Ultimate Edition was installed on a computer with an AMD Phenom II X6 1090T processor, a Gigabyte motherboard with a 785G chipset, and 2x1 GB of Kingston DDR3 RAM.
Red and black. Black is the external drive and graphics card. Red is everything else.
The graphics card was a single one - a Reference AMD Radeon HD6950 with 2 Gigabytes of VRAM. (A reference card means it was made by AMD itself, not by vendors.)
The black lord in person.
It was connected to a plasma TV Panasonic TX-PR50VT20 via HDMI 1.4. It's not a very ordinary TV because, besides receiving TV programs and connecting to a computer, it has a static contrast ratio of 5,000,000:1 and a response time of 0.001 ms.
Oh yes! And most importantly — full support for HD 3D! In fact, this is why we went to the esteemed Kirill Kochetkov - to see how DAO would look and work on such equipment.
Kirill, this is Morrigan. Morrigan, this is Morrigan... So we can say everything works.
The game looks simply amazing. There were no complaints from Dragon Age or the attendees about the image quality. The 50-inch Panasonic and AMD 6950 performed impeccably. The black color was indeed black, and everything else....
Do you like this TV too, milady?
There was no time left for the rest of this wonder device's components.
Brezhnev could only envy the number of pompous dangly bits of this monitor!
It was time to move on to what we actually came for.
So, Dragon Age and 3D.
Now let’s see what kind of Beast we have here.
First of all, as is well known, the software part was activated — the driver from TriDef
There were no issues with configuring the driver for Dragon Age — it already had ready presets for this game.
The hardware, i.e., the plastic part of 3D consisted of activating such futuristic glasses by pushing a small button on the side.
After which...
Now there will be a pause.
You see, 3D snapshots from a 3D monitor, unfortunately due to technical reasons, could not be made at this time. In fact, the TriDef driver allows for three-dimensional screenshots but only for viewing on stereoscopic equipment.
Unfortunately, I don’t have such equipment at home (for now). If anyone has it — let me know; we will make such screenshots for you!
For now, I'll limit myself to impressions.
You understand what I meant by this... 3D!!!
Neither Panasonic, nor AMD, nor DAO deceived — 3D was truly real. Wonderful, magnificent 3D. Considering that due to the huge monitor (without any seams), the immersive effect was almost 100% (the edges of the image are not visible), the addition of this three-dimensionality was mind-blowing in no time.
Especially in cutscenes running on the game engine.
And by the way, especially in the erotic cutscenes — since all relevant mods were installed, yeah.
It is also worth noting that there was a lack of three-dimensionality in some already pre-generated videos. The battle at Ostagar, the introductory video, and so on were two-dimensional. But it seems to me that within three years, 3D videos will definitely start to be included in games. (Or sold as DLC, holy-holy-holy!)
Additionally, honesty requires noting that while the visual aspect was wonderfully three-dimensional, the interface - menus, icons, and especially cursors - remained two-dimensional. This somewhat hindered gameplay — hitting a two-dimensional cursor that moves on a plane within a three-dimensional fight in the right place is a far from trivial task.
Keep an eye on it - diamond!
Again, the shutter principle of the glasses significantly affected eye fatigue. It neither strained my eyes nor flickered, but playing in three-dimensional mode for a long time is still tiring.
Well, we lifted her eyelids... Who will look?
Nevertheless, at a resolution of 1980 by 1080, with maximum quality settings, and full 3D (which means alternating output of two frames for synchronization in the glasses), there were no slowdowns at all. I am not a fan of counting FPS to the last frame and rely in this case not on numbers but on the subjective comfort of the game.
I can honestly say — this comfort level of playing DAO on the specified configuration received 10 points out of five.
It should be mentioned that due to the time it took to install the game and its setup (attaching mods to load saves. Yes, I use mods!) — there was no time to play for a long while. But I believe that the DAO game blog will meet with AMD many more times for further testing of the latest technologies.
Moreover, I strongly advise following the blog and its updates. A lot of interesting and exciting things are expected.
Now, to make this interesting and exciting even more so in the future, I want to conduct a small survey. If you don’t mind, please comment on what graphics card you have.
I’m with you, friends!