![]() It’s like the perfect mix between Shen Mue, GTA IV, Yakuza and True Crime. Gameplay wise, Sleeping Dogs is brilliant. TODs could also get an overhaul with an ENBSeries mod, however Boris Vorontsov is not currently working on United Front Games’ title. Sleeping Dogs does not support any form of Global illumination and as such, its lighting and pre-baked shadows seem a bit underwhelming. Using diffuse maps to ‘trick’ the player got old the moment we set our eyes on the Brigate 2 Engine. SSAO makes a huge difference when you’re walking around in environments and during the night, however, we can’t help but notice all the ‘common’ issues that are introduced via the – somewhat – old lighting system that is featured in most current-generation games. Well, that is if you own a DX11 card, because the rest of you will notice some polygon edges on the characters. Most textures are of high quality (although you will notice some low-res here and there) and thanks to DX11’s tessellation feature, you won’t notice any blocky characters. Graphics wise, Sleeping Dogs looks great for an open-world game. In our test system, Sleeping Dogs ran with over 60fps, unless we were driving inside the city. A GTX 295, on the other hand, will offer you a ‘constant 60fps’ experience – provided your CPU does not hold you back. A single GTX 275 will be able to push 30fps at all times with max settings and normal AA. Yes, you’ll still notice pop-ups here and there but the overall experience is better than the one of consoles. Not only that, but the developers have added SSAO, higher quality shadows, and a better LOD system. The extreme anti-aliasing value is basically FXAA with 4x4SSAA, a technique that is quite demanding. Moreover, United Front Games has added a lot of graphical effects that will stress your GPUs, no matter what. As stated above, the game scales with quad-cores and takes advantage of them. Sleeping Dogs is both CPU and the GPU dependent. And no, this was not a stuttering effect, similar to the one of the other open-world, sandbox games. It didn’t matter whether there were a lot of NPCs around us or not. What’s really funny is that our framerate was sky rocketing to 60s as soon as we were stopping driving. Every single time we were speeding up, the game’s performance was dropping to mid 40s. However, we also noticed a weird, unexplained, performance hit when we were driving inside the city. There is 15fps performance different between a dual-core and a quad-core, and we are pretty sure that CPUs of new architecture will benefit this game. Sleeping Dogs is definitely optimized for quad-cores, as our Q9650 was stressed like no other game. Truth be told, there were occasions where SLI scaling was dropping to 65%, however none of the other SLI profiles that were suggested (0x084010F5 or 0x080116F5) were working any better. There have been various reports for this, default SLI profile, as people stated that it did not offer an ideal scaling. Nvidia has already included an SLI profile for the game, meaning that you won’t have to mess around with Nvidia’s Inspector Tool. As always, we used an overclocked Q9650 at 4.2Ghz with 4GB RAM, an Nvidia GTX 295 GPU, Windows 7-64Bit and the latest version of GeForce ForceWare drivers. And as you may have already guessed, United Front Games has delivered. Not only that, but United Front Games has added better textures, DX11 features, as well as native SSAA support (similar to the one of The Witcher 2). The publisher stated that Sleeping Dogs would support multi-GPUs and multi-core CPUs, and unlike other games it would take advantage of the additional cores of quad-cores. A couple of months ago, Square Enix boasted about the PC version and its specific features. Publishers and other developers, start taking notes – this is how you port your games to the PC. Both Rockstar and United Front Games have decided to spend some extra time on the PC versions of their games, and that time did pay off. In fact, Sleeping Dogs PC is – almost – as good as the PC version of Max Payne 3. ![]() Sleeping Dogs is one of the best PC ports we’ve seen in recent years.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |