Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2
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ESRB:
Blood,Language - Mild,Violence
Publisher: UbiSoft Genre(s): Action, Shooting Home Page: http://ghostrecon.uk.ubi.com/graw2/
Haven't I seen this before?
Light on graphics options, and what is available are mostly for performance tuning.
GRAW 2's gameplay is cast in nice visuals - capable, but nothing spectacular. Swedish developer GRIN - the same team behind the original GRAW - use their in-house GRIN Diesel engine (get it?). The engine has been upgraded to version 7, and requires a Direct3D 9.0c-capable graphics card with Shader Model 2.0 capabilities. In other words, there's nothing new here, and this looks like a game I've seen a dozen times since 2004. However, there's a wide range of possibilities using the same set of hardware and software requirements, and GRAW 2 is a good example of a D3D9.0c title. The textures and skins are all respectable, and the environments - including some of the non-interactive vehicle models - are fleshed out with moderate detail. Human models are up to the same standard, but the animations leave a bit to be desired. There's a certain hitching when a character moves abruptly from one animation to another, as if the interpolation between animations occurs too rapidly. Overall, the visuals are adequate but at least the bloom lighting isn't overdone.
High texture detail - as good as it gets.
Graphics options are limited, and the few that are available have little effect on the visual experience (unless turned completely off). For instance, I had a hard time distinguishing between High and Medium dynamic shadow detail settings (although Low was noticeably blurry). The same held true for the Texture detail – Medium and High are very close in quality, but Low turned the landscape to a washed-out mess. After moving the Effects detail from High to Low, I was hard pressed to find any difference between the two settings; explosions had a few more bits of debris, but that hardly counts as noteworthy. The other options, such as dynamic lighting and bloom lighting, are a must; only turn these off if performance on your system absolutely dictates it. Finally, the Edge Smoothing offered is not true anti-aliasing, and due to the game's rendering backend, no amount of forcing AA through video card drivers will enable true AA. That said, Edge Smoothing offered some benefit in reducing stair-stepping jaggies, so turn it on - the performance hit is minimal.
Even a moderate system is quite capable of playing GRAW 2 with medium (and sometimes high) graphics settings. The settings on the box aren't far from reality, which is a welcome surprise. As usual, watch out for misleading product naming and number from both ATI and NVIDIA though. Pay attention to GPU details such as the number of shader processing units and place less emphasis on a higher product number. For instance, a NVIDA
Ideally, to run the game at a steady 30+ FPS at a resolution of 1600x1200, you'll want a system similar to our YouGamers Recommended setup. There's little difference in visuals once the minimum requirements have been met, but having at least the YG recommendation will ensure a playable frame rate on higher resolutions. NVIDIA users running on Windows Vista, beware: newer and better-performing drivers have a bug which prevents rendering any shadows, so stick with the latest WHQL release. Even then, there are glitches involving dynamic shadows which show up from time to time. ATI users, rejoice: I experienced no such issues with the latest Catalyst driver release.
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