Technical Bits

Universe at War supports DX10 on Vista, but like with so many other games, this support is just a "tickbox" feature - a bit of extra stuff on top of a DX9 game. The visuals in DX10 mode are ever-so-slightly improved, most noticeably in the lighting department, but if you are playing in DX9 mode, you are not missing out on much. DX10 also bumps up the effective requirements quite a lot, and in practice you need either a Get it! ATI Radeon HD3850 or Get it! NVIDIA GeForce 8800 series card to play, and even then the game has a tendency to slow to a crawl in DX10 mode when the unit count starts to approach the maximum for the map. At maximum settings, using ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT and Athlon 64 FX62, some missions slumbered onwards at around 5-8 fps in DX10 mode - not exactly playable, even for a RTS.

Masari forces landing - DX9 style.

DX10 changes the lighting model, but beyond that, the visual differences are hard to spot.

In DX9 mode, the practical system requirements are bit more friendly, but still you need a fairly modern gaming system to play. Multiple cores are supported with a properly multithreaded engine and if played on a single core system, only the fastest available processors are good enough. A dual core system is definitely recommended, together with a fast DX9 card - we recommend an ATI Radeon X1800 series or NVIDIA GeForce 7800 series as the practical minimum. You can play with slightly slower cards, and even SM2.0 cards such as the Radeon X800 are supported, but the performance and visuals will suffer a lot on such systems.

Low settings - runs on the configuration listed on the box, but looks fairly crude.	Low - no shadows, low resolution textures and general lack of detail.
Medium - plays fine on the YouGamers minimum system.	Shadows are there, but there are still some apparent visual compromises.
Maximum settings (DX9) look fairly pretty...	...but you need a proper gaming video card.

The YouGamers minimum system will run the medium settings fine in DX9 mode, while the YouGamers recommended system will handle the maximum visuals at a playable frame rate in DX9 mode. For DX10, the recommended system together with Windows Vista is the practical minimum, and even then you will have some performance issues when things heat up.