Risen Video Card Benchmarks

The hardware savvy folks at PCGamesHardware.de have benchmarked Risen with several different video cards, including ATI’s new Radeon HD 5870.

The setting of Risen is based upon the almost completely new developed DirectX 9 engine which is visually similar to the Genome Engine used in Gothic 3. Render techniques like improved Depth of Field, Screen Space Ambient Occlusion, Cascade Shadow Mapping plus Soft Shadows as well as FP16 HDR Rendering including adaptive Tone Mapping and new water shaders definitely put the graphics beyond Gothic 3 level. Among other things HDR is one reason why Risen did not get official support for Anti-aliasing either.

For the new developed Seamless World Streaming system a single Thread or ideally a single CPU core is responsible – during streaming the framerate drops for a short time only instead of heavy stuttering like in Gothic 3. According to the task manager Risen indeed uses the capacity of two cores most of the time. Sometimes even three during streaming. Nvidia’s Physx Engine plays a role as well. It is used again but in the CPU instead of the GPU version.