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The Settlers: Rise of an Empire

The shiny is not for everyone

Some reviews have already criticized Rise of an Empire for being a huge resource hog, so our testing began with the expectation of poor frame rates at the low end. With the impressive visuals like these, the claims printed on the box seemed unrealistic. According to Ubisoft, to run the game you need just a lowly ATI Radeon 9500 or NVIDIA GeForce 4 Ti-series card, and the minimum processor is set just as low (a 2 GHz Pentium 4 or similar Athlon XP 2000+). I expected a full-on slideshow, but surprisingly the game scales very well towards the low end, so at first I didn't quite figure out why people complained - it plays surprisingly well on the publisher's minimum.

The Settlers on the YouGamers minimum system (using GeForce Ti4600)

The city looks quite acceptable, and you can even use crude shadows.

So, what's up? Where is the slideshow? Based on testing with a couple of other cards, borrowed from our private museum, the frame rate didn't budge at all as the hardware changed (while the settings stayed the same). There is some occasional slowdown with the listed minimum, but swapping in a faster video card didn't really change anything - only a faster CPU would speed up the performance. So, with low end hardware, The Settlers: Rise of an Empire is very much CPU-limited, and if you don't mind pushing all the sliders to the minimum settings, any DX8 card with Shader Model 1.3 support will run the game when it's paired with a reasonably modern CPU. Since The Settlers is a strategy title, rolling at a leisurely pace, even 20fps is barely playable, and that's what you get with a 2 GHz CPU. For comfortable play around 30fps you need slightly more, and that's where we set the YouGamers minimum setup (2.4 GHz). Moving from single core to dual core gives only a very slight benefit, so in that regard only the raw speed of one core matters here.

It was time to move up with the testing - and when I moved to the midrange systems, the apparent reason for the horror stories became clear. The game eats baby midrange systems for breakfast. It appears that when you move to a more recent hardware, and enable the eye candy by turning on the SM2.0 shaders, the need for serious pixel-pushing hardware becomes apparent. For comparison on the different visuals, here is a set of images at Low, Medium and Ultra High settings.

Everything set to minimum.	Textures are a mess, and shadows are gone, but it runs even on a 64MB card.
Moving to Medium settings, things look a lot nicer, but the requirements shoot up.	Don't expect to get these visuals on any midrange card - this is what you can get on the YouGamers recommended setup.
Going for the Ultra settings, there is even more shiny detail.	Pretty, but requires top end hardware.

Low is far cruder than what even a Ti4600 managed to push, yet when you jump to medium, all that shiny stuff bumps up the system requirements considerably. How much? Picking a common midrange card from a few years back,  GeForce 6600 GT 128MB would seem like a good candidate. Nope, could not handle medium. 10-15fps, regardless of the CPU. The only way to get the game to a playable speed using the 6600 GT is to drop the shaders to SM1.3 mode. That immediately bumps the frame rate to 30-40fps - and the game once again hits the CPU wall (looking almost the same as on the the YouGamers minimum setup).

After testing several different cards up from the GeForce 6600 GT, The Settlers finally allows you to run at the CPU-limited 30-40fps at medium settings when you toss in an  NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GT (or an  ATI Radeon X1950 Pro). When pushed further (towards Ultra settings), only the latest cards (GeForce 8800 series, Radeon HD2900 series) offer playable frame rates. On an  ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT paired with an  AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 (2.8GHz) the Ultra High settings run fine at 1600x1200, with the frame rate changing as the CPU is downclocked - indicating that it's yet again hitting the CPU wall.

There seems to be something fairly odd going on with The Settlers graphics engine, and the conclusion is that the YouGamers minimum allows you to play happily with the simple shaders. Sure, the game looks cruder, but it plays just the same. However, should you dare to ask for all the eye candy visible in the screenshots and trailers, then the system requirements are extremely steep. It's clear that Blue Byte has attempted to provide something for a wide range of systems, but there is a gap - if you enable SM2.0 shaders, the bottleneck moves from CPU to GPU until you move to considerably faster cards. With many cards you are forced to disable the SM2.0 shaders, even if your hardware otherwise would support them, or suffer unplayable frame rates. In a way this reminds me of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - just like The Settlers, it ran fine on very old systems using a DX8 codepath, but once you enabled the full DX9 Shader Model 2.0 stuff, it just destroyed the performance on any midrange system.

Additionally, if you want to get the Texture and Terrain Quality settings to maximum, you also need a 512MB+ graphics card; on a 256MB card the sliders are limited to the second highest setting.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: Managing Cities & SettlersPage 3: Creating an army to expandPage 4: Quests, Art & IssuesPage 5: Hardware Reqs & PerformancePage 6: Final Thoughts & Scores

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