Risen Screenshots and Performance Evaluation

PCGamesHardware.de managed to get their hands on a preview copy of Risen and have used the opportunity to dish up some new screenshots and an evaluation of the RPG’s performance on one of their gaming rigs.

For our test system with a Core 2 Extreme C2E QX6850 (4x 3.0 GHz) with 4 GiByte DDE2-1066 RAM and a Geforce GTX 285/1G Risen wasn’t a big challenge even though our preview version has not been optimized yet: With maximal details, 16:1 High Quality Anisotropic Filtering at a resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 pixels, Risen was running almost completely at 25 to 30 fps. When the system was streaming, the framerate temporarily dropped below 20 fps in some cases, while the game was running at more than 50 frames per second when we were inside a dungeon. Lowering the resolution didn’t result in a real performance benefit, but if the processor was running at 2.0 GHz instead of 3.0 GHz the framerate was lowered noticeably – so apparently Risen is just as CPU limited as Gothic, although the game will most likely be optimized before the final release.

Uh oh. That’s a hefty machine to be dropping down to 20 FPS.