NVIDIA GeForce 9800GX2 Review - Benchmarking Overlord

For me, Overlord is a guilty pleasure. I haven't gotten very far in the game, but I love being the bad guy. I also find Overlord to be a very pretty game. Even though it doesn't have the lifelike foliage of LOTRO, or the mind-numbing amount of textures in Oblivion, it will puts a video card through its paces. Overlord responded to the 7950GX2 about how I would expect, with valleys at the Surround resolutions, a peak at 1280x1024, and a downward trend at the 4M pixel range. What did surprise me is that the game is still demanding enough to be GPU limited on the 9800GX2, even at the low-end of the pixel scale.

The 9800GX2 added 7-12fps across the board. Depending on the original fps from the 7950GX2, this represented a 25% (at 1024x768) to 50% (at 2560x1600) jump in framerates. The two trend lines have virtually the exact same shape, the line for the 9800GX2 happens to be "bumped" up a bit. The 9800GX2 brings the low end of the scale north of 50fps, the middle ground into the 40's, and the high-end to 30fps. All in all, it makes the game much more playable.

I played the game long enough to pass the training and intro mission. This allowed me to enter into the game world and pick a free roaming path. I found a rather short path that allowed me to wind though the countryside, catch a sunset, and some particle effects. Like LOTRO, it's not a long run; but it is long enough to put both cards through their paces.

I ran the game at max settings with 4xAA and V-sync off.