Dungeon Siege III PC Performance Analysis

Dungeon Siege III’s release is still a week off, but DSOGaming uses its press review copy to give us a PC performance analysis of the multi-platform title.

As we said previously, Dungeon Siege III is CPU bound. Thankfully, Onyx takes advantage of quadcores and scales great. We witnessed a CPU usage of 70-80% on all four cores of our Q9650 that is clocked at 4.2Ghz. Moreover, we tried to simulate a dualcore system by disabling two of our CPU cores. CPU usage jumped to 100% on both of our two remaining cores, and we experienced some stuttering, especially inside towns. We also saw a 14-18fps performance hit. Our framerate was dropping bellow 50s inside downs. And keep in mind that we were using an overclocked CPU. Dungeon Siege III is a game that truly showcases the advantage of having a high-end quadcore CPU, so be warned if you are stuck with a dualcore system.

All in all, Dungeon Siege III is a console game and as most console games, is CPU bound and doesn’t require a high-end GPU. Quadcore owners will be delighted with Onyx’s scaling, whereas those owning dualcore CPUs will encounter performance issues and experience CPU limitations. And for God’s sake, don’t you dare to play the game with a mouse+keyboard. Another of the game’s issues is its control scheme and the fact that it was developed with controllers in mind. The mouse+keyboard scheme was an afterthought, and we are really disappointed with this. And it’s sad, as there are a lot of top-down/isometric low-budget games that have a better mouse+keyboard implementation than the one of Dungeon Siege III. To put it simple; if you don’t have a controller, you will hate it. Surely, if a mouse+keyboard is your only option you will eventually get used to it. but still. It sucks and we can’t find any reason at all for torturing yourselves with this dreadful control scheme.