A Free-To-Play MMO? Neverwinter Performance, Benchmarked

[cleeve]

Neverwinter is a new free-to-play MMO in the Dungeons And Dragons universe, sporting an action RPG flavor. We benchmark it with a number of graphics cards and CPUs, uncovering a processor-oriented bottleneck along the way. Does your platform measure up?

A Free-To-Play MMO? Neverwinter Performance, Benchmarked : Read more

 

[Yargnit]

Although I play on my desktop normally, I've briefly tested logging in to Neverwinter on my Ultrabook, and it is actually surprisingly playable with settings turned down.

It's running a 3317u w/HD4000 4GB RAM on Win8 @ 1600x900 & it runs w/o issues on minimum settings (100% scale, 50% hi-res character draw distance).

No exact numbers to report, but I can run around the main city (which with it being the central congregation point for everyone tends to be one of the laggier spots) without issues. Sure it doesn't look the best my any stretch, but it's workable without a doubt in a pinch.

 

[de5_Roy]

i can't believe it...
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/neverwinter-performance-benchmark,3495-4.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/neverwinter-performance-benchmark,3495-5.html
i could believe fx8350 sinking itself to core i3 level performance (it's kinda fx8350's routine) but hd4000 significantly outperforming radeon 7660g in min., avg., and frame time variance? with dual core i5 vs quadcore a10 even...
how would an overclocked i5 3550 or 3570k or fx6300 would fare in this game?

 

[rootheday]

well... would you look at that. Intel HD 4000 soundly beats the top AMD mobile APU

 

[silverblue]

The 4600M is horribly limiting - it's that low clock speed. I can only hope that AMD have learned their lesson and gone for a much higher clock speed for Richland's mobile derivatives.

A good measure of how badly the 4600M is limiting performance would be to give the 5800K a run with its integrated graphics - there's a significant clock speed difference.

 

[Greg Williams]

[citation][nom]TheCapulet[/nom]I don't want a Neverwinter MMO. I want a Neverwinter Nights 3, with a proper toolset and brilliant online/modding community. That's what Neverwinter is all about. Twitch action has never been what this IP was about. Thanks again for ruining everything, WotC.[/citation]

You obviously missed where they said it is unrelated to Neverwinter Nights - different studio, totally different game. Neverwinter is merely a place in the Forgotten Realms. So bringing up 'waaaahhh, I want NWN3' is rather pointless here.

 

[Greg Williams]

[citation][nom]Greg Williams[/nom]You obviously missed where they said it is unrelated to Neverwinter Nights - different studio, totally different game. Neverwinter is merely a place in the Forgotten Realms. So bringing up 'waaaahhh, I want NWN3' is rather pointless here.[/citation]

And I don't see how an MMO based on the Forgotten Realms ruins everything. Why can't you have both this AND NWN3? Just don't play this one, and play what you want...

 

[DarkSable]

Sure, you can use real money to buy in-game items, but you can also earn those items through by playing and trading in-game currency (Astral Diamonds) for paid currency (Zen, sold online through the game's publisher, Perfect World). This is an ideal way for a free-to-play game to operate: no restrictions on non-paying players, and everything in the cash store can be earned through play.

I'm sorry, but this comparison is ABSOLUTELY WRONG. Yes, it's easier to trade for pay-to-play content in neverwinter, but you then say that this is far better to DDO, where you can't...

Except that you can. Playing even a little bit will give you favor with certain patrons. As you get more of this favor, you are AUTOMATICALLY given "turbine points" which is the currency you buy with money. You can earn everything in the game just by playing; sure, it'll take a little while, but I'm sure that neverwinters' solution will too.

So don't make a claim that's completely wrong, please. The "review" parts on the game felt so biased it's not even funny.

 

[digiex]

That a lot of specs for an MMORPG.

 

[Cryio]

This joke "the price tag is free-ninety-nine" looses its importance when you realise that it accumultes to 1 dollar and therefore isn't free anymore.

 

[alidan]

wow... whats with the couboundness of this game...

 

[Traciatim]

Yet again we see any game that requires a descent amount of CPU power that AMD falls flat on it's face.

I sure wish AMD was still in this competition so that we wouldn't have things like Haswell being essentially the same CPU as Ivy Bridge with a few tweaks and a better useless section that gets instantly disabled if you want to actually play games.

 

[yannigr]

From bad programmed games are we going to extremely horribly stupidly 5year old child programmed games?

 

[jacobdrj]

"But don't bother with a dual-core CPU that Hyper-Threaded. "
Should read:
"But don't bother with a dual-core CPU that is Hyper-Threaded."
or
"But don't bother with a dual-core CPU that has Hyper-Threading."
or
"But don't bother with a dual-core CPU that uses Hyper-Threading."

Thanks

 

[kettu]

Why are you not giving out the CPU framelatency results anymore? Sometime ago you had an article about it and I got the impression that it was going to be incorporated to your future articles. What's going on with that?

 

[Onus]

I'll probably try this, if only because it's free, but I really hope it isn't too twitchy. I've got an uncoordinated left hand, which really limits my enjoyment of twitch games.

 

[maddogfargo]

Ok thats better...

My 1090t @ 4.0GHz on max detail and a single 7950 gives 60+ FPS in explorable areas and mid 40's in populated towns. Happy to say it performs well, much better than the APU in this test.

This game, like Guild Wars 2, seems to rely heavily on a single core render pipe. 2-3 other supporting cores will get used, but at a reduced level. So the intel CPUs will do better thanks to stronger single core performance.

The problem is, single-core development is 5 years old. No matter what CPU you use, modern games will bottleneck there when developed this way. Optimizing to take *FULL* advantage of 4+ cores will greatly improve performance for everyone, intel or AMD.

 

[cleeve]

[citation][nom]kettu[/nom]Why are you not giving out the CPU framelatency results anymore? Sometime ago you had an article about it and I got the impression that it was going to be incorporated to your future articles. What's going on with that?[/citation]

Because CPU frame latency results are so consistently low (well below 15 milliseconds) they're insignificant. The only time I've seen them be an issue is with APUs, and that's covered.

 

[xelliz]

Definitely a fun game and even more enjoyable as I've spent more time with it. The gateway page is an awesome addition, imo.

I know its getting a little long in the tooth, but I would have loved to see an I7-920 included in the test. I am now very interested to see how my system compares as far as numbers go. Playing I haven't felt like the game was running slow at all, but I haven't actually looked at fps numbers, nor have I changed any of the graphics settings from default.

 

[cleeve]

[citation][nom]jacobdrj[/nom]"But don't bother with a dual-core CPU that Hyper-Threaded. "Should read:"But don't bother with a dual-core CPU that is Hyper-Threaded." or"But don't bother with a dual-core CPU that has Hyper-Threading."or"But don't bother with a dual-core CPU that uses Hyper-Threading."Thanks[/citation]

Actually, *all* of those are incorrect due to our omission.

Fixed to:

"But don't bother with a dual-core CPU that isn't Hyper-Threaded. "

 

[cleeve]

[citation][nom]DarkSable[/nom]I'm sorry, but this comparison is ABSOLUTELY WRONG. Yes, it's easier to trade for pay-to-play content in neverwinter, but you then say that this is far better to DDO, where you can't...Except that you can. Playing even a little bit will give you favor with certain patrons. As you get more of this favor, you are AUTOMATICALLY given "turbine points" which is the currency you buy with money. [/citation]

You're absolutely right, we neglected to mention Turbine points. That was an oversight that's been fixed with the following edit:

[edit: we should clarify that DDO does allow you to earn Turbine Points in game, but they're relatively difficult to accumulate. More importantly, DDO requires players to purchase access to game content, but all of the content is free in Neverwinter]

Having said that, if you've played DDO you know that it's not viable to expect to have all access to all the content simply by playing and accumulating Turbine points "a little while". They're much, much harder to come by than Astral Diamonds.

[citation][nom]DarkSable[/nom]You can earn everything in the game just by playing; sure, it'll take a little while, but I'm sure that neverwinters' solution will too. [/citation]

Astral Diamonds are much easier to accumulate, but the real point here is that you don't need them at all to access every mission in the game. That's a huge distinction.

I've played DDO for years with friends who won't play anything else, so I'm not without experience. It's just not realistic to suggest you can have access to all content in DDO without using actual cash. In Neverwinter, it's not an issue.


[citation][nom]DarkSable[/nom]The "review" parts on the game felt so biased it's not even funny.[/citation]

I would disagree. Your accusation seems a bit vague, aside from the Turbine Point mistake that we fixed, what "review" parts are you referring to?

 

[Wisecracker]

Geezzz ... what a horribly coded game. 5% difference between a 650ti and an HD 7970?

 

[BVKnight]

I play this game on the highest settings with a stock 3570k and stock Radeon 7870. I haven't checked my fps, because I haven't had to--everything has been really smooth (with one exception, see below). There is a bit of an issue with pop-in, and maybe I need to delve deeper into the settings: models and textures for scenery are rendered much lower at a certain distance, and as you get closer they will suddenly change drastically, which is mildly disorienting.

The one issue I'm running into is when doing dungeons with parties of 5 players. As soon as there are a ton of spells flying around the screen, the game seems to lag. Enemies teleport a few feet at a time (not because of their abilities), and there is mild hitching. It's enough that I turn down the graphics settings when I run dungeons. I'm disappointed in this, since my hardware should be more than enough to handle the increased particle effects that are floating around. Not sure what's going on here.

 

[bak0n]

[citation][nom]BVKnight[/nom]I play this game on the highest settings with a stock 3570k and stock Radeon 7870. I haven't checked my fps, because I haven't had to--everything has been really smooth (with one exception, see below). [/citation]

The game is in Open beta still. Hence the daily fixes. I have exactly the same combo in my setup and nothing of an issue anywhere @1080p.

 

[whyso]

Nice to see mobile in there.