Rainbow Six: Vegas: A Performance Analysis
by Josh Venning on December 25, 2006 6:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Gaming
Setting Expectations
As we mentioned, Rainbow Six: Vegas is one of the first games out that incorporates the Unreal Engine 3, which makes it somewhat special. Another game out which uses the Unreal Engine 3 is Gears of War for the Xbox 360, which we hope to see released for the PC sometime soon. We can hope that Rainbow Six: Vegas performance will reflect future games based on the Unreal Engine 3, because compared to games like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion when it was first released, the biggest and best GPU available isn't really required to enjoy this game right now. To be fair, it's worth nothing that the performance requirements are about as strenuous as Oblivion, if not slightly higher; the only difference is that the new GeForce 8800 series is now available.
The Unreal Engine 2 made use of DX8, but DX9 elements (things like HDR and shadow effects) were added in more recent games like Splinter Cell: Double Agent. The Unreal Engine 3 is more based on the programmable graphics aspect of DX9, and future titles using UE3 should also support DX10/WGF2. This basically means developers have more flexibility when making a game for this engine. A lot of game developers licensed the UE2, and we are expecting the same with the UE3. At any rate, the next big game expected using the Unreal Engine 3 is in fact Unreal Tournament 2007, which will hopefully be available soon.
We mentioned in the introduction that the game had a few issues we wish would have been addressed before Rainbow Six: Vegas was released. One of them is that as of right now, there doesn't seem to be any support for SLI or Crossfire setups. This is bad news because Vegas is one game that could use the type of flexibility a multi-GPU system could provide. Another issue that could be seen as a drawback is the lack of antialiasing in the game. There is no option for turning on AA and we aren't extremely surprised about this given that the game uses the very new Unreal Engine 3. Hopefully we will see support for this in the future though, as the fastest GPUs should be able to handle HDR as well as FSAA.
As we mentioned, Rainbow Six: Vegas is one of the first games out that incorporates the Unreal Engine 3, which makes it somewhat special. Another game out which uses the Unreal Engine 3 is Gears of War for the Xbox 360, which we hope to see released for the PC sometime soon. We can hope that Rainbow Six: Vegas performance will reflect future games based on the Unreal Engine 3, because compared to games like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion when it was first released, the biggest and best GPU available isn't really required to enjoy this game right now. To be fair, it's worth nothing that the performance requirements are about as strenuous as Oblivion, if not slightly higher; the only difference is that the new GeForce 8800 series is now available.
The Unreal Engine 2 made use of DX8, but DX9 elements (things like HDR and shadow effects) were added in more recent games like Splinter Cell: Double Agent. The Unreal Engine 3 is more based on the programmable graphics aspect of DX9, and future titles using UE3 should also support DX10/WGF2. This basically means developers have more flexibility when making a game for this engine. A lot of game developers licensed the UE2, and we are expecting the same with the UE3. At any rate, the next big game expected using the Unreal Engine 3 is in fact Unreal Tournament 2007, which will hopefully be available soon.
We mentioned in the introduction that the game had a few issues we wish would have been addressed before Rainbow Six: Vegas was released. One of them is that as of right now, there doesn't seem to be any support for SLI or Crossfire setups. This is bad news because Vegas is one game that could use the type of flexibility a multi-GPU system could provide. Another issue that could be seen as a drawback is the lack of antialiasing in the game. There is no option for turning on AA and we aren't extremely surprised about this given that the game uses the very new Unreal Engine 3. Hopefully we will see support for this in the future though, as the fastest GPUs should be able to handle HDR as well as FSAA.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
32 Comments
View All Comments
kreacher - Monday, May 21, 2007 - link
I would love to see an update on this article once the 2600 has been released.SGTLindy - Saturday, December 30, 2006 - link
it runs better on ATI and does not have many graphics options because its a Xbox 360 port!!Runs great on the 360....runs slower on the PC....wow that was tuff to figure out.
Gears of War looks better on the U3 engine because...the GOW team made the U3 engine...if anyone is going to know how to tweak a U3 based game it would be them, especially since the engine just came out.
None of this is rocket science.
Sharky974 - Friday, December 29, 2006 - link
There is a user over at B3D saying his Rainbow Six Vegas box (he also provided a photo) says Unreal engine 2, NOT Unreal engine 3. And his photo backs that up. Apparantly R6 might be a "UE2.5" game.Anand wouldn't be the only site to make that mistake, but you guys might wanna look into it..
bisket - Wednesday, December 27, 2006 - link
exactly, rocky.the heli rides do not tax my system at all. it's during levels that i have the *oh so very annoying* fps random drops to 20 from 60.
i just hope this is not a growing trend in games. enough said. anandtech rocks! ;)
R0CKY - Wednesday, December 27, 2006 - link
Was benchmarking the heli ride in these test really the best way to test Vegas performance? What percentage of the game is actually spent flying in a heli, and is testing the part of the game where the player switches off and doesn't really care what is going on in game the best part of the game to test?I appreciate there was no easy way to benchmark due to there being no in-game system to replay the same scene more than once, but at the end of the day it is the game's performance during firefights and urban scenes that is of interest to the gamer, not level-transition heli rides.
Is it valid to assume that the engines rednering performance is the same for detailed character models as it is for long draw/low detail high altitude scenes?
Rather than settling for an easily reproducible scene of little revelance, personally I'd would have liked to have seen something a bit more relevant tested, even if it took some ingenuity to come up. It is possible to get quite accurate comparisons, for example, by simply recording the FPS as a character runs the same path through a level several times - at least that way we'd get a report showing FPS from scenes the player is interested in, rather than unimportant heli rides.
That comes of like a bit of a rant, but it is meant to be constructive comment, honest!
:o)
mlambert890 - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link
Weird, but to be honest, I actually do better in game (even during fire-fights), then in that heli ride. My thinking was that the engine isnt particularly efficient at rendering the wide-open city scape.With an FX-60 o/c to 2.8Ghz and an X1900XTX@650/775 and 2GB PC3200 I get 30-40fps on the heli ride, but I very rarely dip below 45fps in game. A couple of the big fights dropped into the 20's but it didnt really disrupt play that badly. Gameplay for 90% of the game ended up better than the heli ride bench would have implied.
If you're interested, AMDZone did an R6:V bench using an avg of in-game framerates rather than the heli ride:
http://www.amdzone.com/modules.php?op=modload&...">http://www.amdzone.com/modules.php?op=m...q=viewar...
VooDooAddict - Monday, February 19, 2007 - link
thanks for the link to that review. Especially like the Single Core vs Dual Core and Dual Core vs Quad.anandtech02148 - Wednesday, December 27, 2006 - link
Gears of War got excellent lighting n shadows,worst unreal 3 engine game... REd orchestra.
i like the first paragraph of this article, It hit the spot, consider i have downloaded 2Gig of patches for BF2!!!
considered games now break the $100 easily for a title.
bisket - Wednesday, December 27, 2006 - link
i don't see really, how this game can get that much praise.1. first off no widescreen support for pc except with a hack.
2. imo i thought graw look a heck of a lot better then this. i hate ports from consoles to pc they dumb it down too much.
3. i'm running a 8800gtx with a c2d 6600 with 2 gigs of pc6400 ram. and this game game me a good 60 fps (1920x1200 everything maxed with widescreen hack) in some areas. in some areas my fps droped to 20 which is unexceptable and just plain dumb. why? maybe because it's just a port and not optimized, i don't care if it's the unreal 3 engine or not, i'm not impressed.
4. before i bash it too hard, i do have to say that despite it's major flaws the game is fun and could be *tons* better.
5. i took this over to a friends house that has the dell 30" and same setup as me (8800gtx and whatnot) and we could not establish a framerate over 30fps, which is just ridiculous. i do not look forward to future pc games that are ported from a console. i will be saving my money next time.
6. why all the low-res texture nonsense? and low geometry? i just don't get it.
7. also, praise for the smoke? it looks bad (as in, not good), IMHO.
i give this game a 5.5 out of 10.
summary: decent graphics with major glitches and major fps drops in random places. fun gameplay. have fun playing online when it doesn't crash. very cool cover system and nice enemy ai.
100proof - Thursday, December 28, 2006 - link
8.) Ingame advertising ---> spyware..http://forums.ubi.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/380106502...">http://forums.ubi.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/380106502...
My question is why don't Review sites like Anandtech hold game publishers like EA and Ubisoft accountable for this new trend of double dipping? Why also aren't publishers held accountable for not having information about spyware on outside of the packaging?
Credit goes to SlipperyJim for info/screencaps below
This shows traffic from when you double click the game icon to when it says "Press any key to begin:
http://www.mods4games.com/images/misc/Vegas1.gif">http://www.mods4games.com/images/misc/Vegas1.gif
Traffic from when you select "Multiplayer > Online":
http://www.mods4games.com/images/misc/Vegas2.gif">http://www.mods4games.com/images/misc/Vegas2.gif
Traffic from when you login with your Username and Password:
http://www.mods4games.com/images/misc/Vegas3.gif">http://www.mods4games.com/images/misc/Vegas3.gif
Traffic when you get a list of games:
http://www.mods4games.com/images/misc/Vegas4.gif">http://www.mods4games.com/images/misc/Vegas4.gif
The interesting locations seems to be "locate.madserver.net" and Demonware.
"madserver.net" is Massive Incorporated server. This is the server for in-game adverts. If you add "locate.madserver.net" to your Windows host file it appears to block the in-game advertising. Below is a link to how it is blocked in Swat 4 (follow the same method but add "locate.madserver.net" to the list):
http://nationalcheeseemporium.org/">http://nationalcheeseemporium.org/
DemonWare is a company that offers matchmaking services (probably just like Gamespy in that they will check your CD key and maintain a master server list of available games). It also is a company that has lobby advertising and also offers something called "DemonWare DNA" which sounds a lot like spyware. Frown
http://www.demonware.net/">http://www.demonware.net/
quote:
The most shocking part was next. The client contacted madserver to tell the advertisers how long the gamer spent with each advert in their view. This is mapped to the gamer id, so they know which player in the game saw the advert, and when, for how long, and from how far away (by virtue of the size attribute). Even the average viewing angle is passed back.