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Alice: Madness Returns test GPU

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Year of construction: 2011
Genre: Arcade (Platform) / 3D / 3rd Person
developer: Spicy Horse
Publishing house: Electronic Arts

Alice: Madness Returns is a computer game developed by Spicy Horse studio under the direction of game designer American McGee. Continuation of the computer game "American McGee's Alice". The publisher is Electronic Arts. Released for Playstation, Xbox 360 and PC. The game was released on June 14, 2011 in the United States and June 17, 2011 in Europe.

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Review: Playability

Like its predecessor, American McGee's Alice, Madness Returns is based on Lewis Carroll's classic tales Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. However, unlike Carroll's works, the games present a different version of Wonderland - dark, filled with cruelty and violence. The action takes place 11 years after the end of the first game. After ten years of treatment, Alice was discharged from a psychiatric clinic, although she was not completely cured of the emotional trauma caused by the death of her parents in a fire.

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During the game's plot, Alice lives in London in an orphanage for mentally traumatized orphans. Her psychiatrist must help her cope with the nightmarish hallucinations that still plague Alice. Alice wants to know the reason for the death of her parents. She agrees to take a hypnosis course, but then she sees something terrible. One day she goes to the market to buy medicine and meets her former psychiatrist from the Rutledge psychiatric hospital, who helped her move to London. At this moment, nightmarish hallucinations begin to visit her again, and she again finds herself in Wonderland. Alice learns that during her absence a terrible evil has settled there. The girl is again trying to save Wonderland and find out the truth about her past.

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The gameplay is very different from the previous game. Some enemies are difficult to defeat with a simple burst of blows, and you will need to exploit their weak points. Additionally, Alice can now shrink and grow at will, which affects gameplay. Also in the game, Alice changes her dress several times, which does not affect the game, but in the main menu she can be dressed in bonus costumes, which have special properties that affect the game. Alice can make multiple jumps and float in the air on her dress. Also, when it decreases, the Shrink View ability is activated, which highlights previously invisible secrets and clues.

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Instead of the Imagination Power Crystals from the previous game, enemies leave behind roses of various sizes and teeth upon death. Teeth are used to upgrade Alice's weapons, and roses are used to replenish health. Weapons no longer require the use of imagination. which simplifies the gameplay. If Alice falls into the abyss, she turns into a flock of blue butterflies that fly away separately and merge back into Alice at the final checkpoint. The same thing happens if you die in battle. Alice can also transform into these butterflies at will to dodge enemy attacks.

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We invite you to evaluate part of the game walkthrough of Alice Madness Returns HD resolution, where you can see for yourself the quality of this product:

In our opinion, the game turned out to be a worthy continuation of its previous part and can both pamper its old fans and find new fans among the gaming audience.


Review: Graphics

 

The graphics in the game are based on an updated version of the Unreal Engine 3.5. In this version, relative to the 3.0 standard, an Ambient occlusion post-processing filter has been added, improving shadows and lighting. The number of processed characters in the frame has been increased. Dynamic water surface technology has been reworked to a new level, soft body physics and destructible environments have also been significantly improved.

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One of the main innovations is the new Unreal Lightmass lighting calculation system, which uses global illumination without losing features that were implemented in older lighting systems. Improved work with multiprocessor systems - distribution of tasks between multiprocessor systems using Unreal Swarm, as well as faster compilation of C++ code and processing of Unreal Script due to Unreal Build Tool.

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NVIDIA PhysX is used as the physics engine. So, for example, a pepper machine gun leaves behind a trail of husks and gunpowder fumes, nasty black creatures fill the ground with oil-like blood, walking teapots with thin legs knock thousands of small fragments out of the ground - while all collisions and interactions are simulated physically correctly, in real time .

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Alice: Madness Returns also boasts the use of the APEX Destruction module, which is responsible for the realistic destruction of game objects. It is quite obvious that with the use of this technology the game looks more attractive, and the gameplay becomes even more real. But what will be the price for these improvements? Next we will try to find out...


 

 

Review: Resource-intensive game

All video cards were tested at maximum graphics quality using MSI Afterburner. The purpose of the test is to determine how video cards from different manufacturers behave under the same conditions. The minimum and average frame size is taken as the performance indicator. Below is the configuration of our test systems.

Hardware configuration

Processors

AMD Phenom II X6 1100T BE 3.33@4 GHz product provided by the company AMD

AMD Phenom II X4 940 BE 3.0@3.7 GHz products provided by the company AMD

AMD Athlon II X4 620 2.6 GHz products provided by the company AMD

Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550@ 4.25 GHz

Intel® Core™ i7-930@4.2 GHz

Intel Core i5-760 2.8@4.2 GHz

motherboards

Gigabyte GA-MA785GT-UD3H products provided by the company AMD

Gigabyte GA-MA790GP-DS4H products provided by the company AMD

Maximus II Formula socket LGA775 product provided by the company Asus

MSI X58 Eclipse Plus socket LGA1366 product provided by the company MSI

MSI P55GD55 socket LGA1156 product provided by the company MSI

MSI 790FX-GD70 socket AM3 product provided by the company MSI

Memory

GOODRAM PLAY 1600MHz (8-8-8-24) product provided by the company GOODRAM

GOODRAM Pro 2000MHz (8-8-8-29) product provided by the company GOODRAM

Video Cards

GeForce 8800 GTS 512 MB
GeForce 8800 GTX 768 MB
EN 8800ULTRA 768 MB product provided by the company Asus
GeForce 9800 GT 512 MB
GeForce 9800 GTX 512 MB
GeForce GTS 250 1024 MB
GeForce GTX 260 896 MB
GeForce GTX 260 core 216
GeForce GTX 280 1024 MB
GeForce GTX 275 896 MB
GeForce GTX 285 1024 MB
GeForce GTS 450 1024 MB product provided by the company Inno3D
GeForce GTX 460 768 MB product provided by the company Leadtek
GeForce GTX 460 1024 MB
GeForce GTX 465 1024 MB
Zotac GeForce GTX 470 1280 MB product provided by the company Zotac
GeForce GTX 480 1536 MB
GeForce GTX 560Ti 1024 MB
GeForce GTX 570 1280 MB
Zotac GeForce GTX 580AMP! 1536 MB product provided by the company Zotac
Radeon HD 3870 512 MB
Radeon HD 4750 512 MB
EAH 4770 512 MB product provided by the company Asus
Radeon HD 4830 512 MB
Radeon HD 4850 1024 MB
MSI Radeon HD 4870 512 MB product provided by the company MSI
MSI Radeon HD 4890 1024 MB product provided by the company MSI/AMD
EAH 5750 FORMULA 1024 mb product provided by the company Asus
MSI Radeon HD 5770 HAWK 1024 MB product provided by the company MSI
Radeon HD 5830 1024 MB
Radeon HD 5850 1024 MB product provided by the company AMD
Radeon HD 5870 1024 mb и Eyefinity 2048 MB products provided by companies XFX/AMD
Radeon HD 6850 1024 MB product provided by the company AMD
Radeon HD 6870 1024 MB
Radeon HD 6950 2048 MB products provided by companies AMD/XFX
Radeon HD 6970 2048 MB products provided by companies AMD/XFX
Radeon HD 6990 4096 MB products provided by companies AMD

Multimedia equipment

3D monitor LG W2363D

Monitor LG E2750

3D Vision Kit product provided by the company Nvidia

Power supplies, cases, cooling systems

Enclosures Chenbro PC61731 product provided by the company Syntex

Seasonic X-850 Seasonic X-660 Seasonic X-760 depending on the stand - products provided by the company Syntex

CPU Cooler GlacialTech Siberia product provided by the company It-Labs

System software and drivers

Operating system

Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate Edition x64

DirectX

DirectX 11

Platform Driver

Intel INF chipset Update Utility 9.1.0.1012

Graphics driver

Nvidia GeForce/ION driver Release 275.33

AMD Catalyst 11.6

Less powerful video cards up to the level of GeForce GTS 450 and Radeon HD 4870 are tested based on Core 2 Quad Q9550 and Phenom II X4 940 BE processors, depending on the resource intensity of the game, and more powerful ones are based on more powerful solutions. Overclocked versions of video cards presented by sponsors were equal to conventional analogues by reducing their clock speeds.

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Our video cards were tested at a resolution of 1920x1080 at the maximum quality settings allowed by the game. NVIDIA 3D Vision and AMD Eyefinity technologies were not tested due to their incomplete support by the game itself. At the moment, Alice: Madness Returns does not have full support for Cross Fire technology and only supports SLI.

Tests were carried out in three modes for setting the quality of physical effects, both for video cards and processors. AMD video cards were tested only at low physics quality settings, since in other cases performance was limited by the central processor.

Testing at maximum quality settings 1920x1080 minimum physics

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As we can see, with maximum quality settings and minimum physics settings, we have quite adequate performance, which will allow all owners of more or less modern gaming systems to enjoy the gameplay.

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The physical effects test was carried out in the most resource-intensive place for this option, by continuously firing Alice from her original “machine gun”. It was the physics of fluids and the abundance of particles and smoke that caused such a very impressive drop in performance.

Testing at maximum quality settings 1920x1080 physics medium

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When physics is set to the average quality level, a completely deplorable picture is observed - when saturated with physical effects, the performance of video cards drops many times over. And it’s not even that the physics load is simply crazy, it’s just that the physical driver is incompletely optimized and there’s an additional load in the form of additional graphic effects. The minimum that will be needed is a video card of the GeForce GTX 470 level. The optimal solution is the GeForce GTX 580.

Testing at maximum quality settings 1920x1080 physics maximum

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Only video cards starting from the GeForce GTX 480 level can handle the maximum physics settings in Alice: Madness Returns. The most optimal solution is to use a dual-chip GeForce GTX 590. Next, we will consider what the most optimal solution as a physics accelerator will be, the second video card.

Testing video cards as a physics accelerator at maximum quality settings 1920x1080 physics maximum

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As we can see, even the GeForce 9800 GT level is capable of pulling the level of physical effects to a comfortable-acceptable level. Video cards starting from the GeForce GTS 580 level will be able to fully feed it, providing the level of performance of the GeForce GTX 250. And as we described earlier, the calculations of physical elements fall not only on the shoulders of the physical accelerator, but also on the graphic sub-part, which significantly reduces the performance of video cards, which we can see in the example of the GeForce GTX 580.

CPU dependency testing

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We tested processor dependence on 10 models of basic configurations, which are the most relevant today. The test was carried out in the place where there is the greatest drop in performance when using physical effects.

Testing at maximum quality settings 1920x1080 minimum physics

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With physics set to the minimum quality level, all tested models of desktop processors coped with the game without problems, showing quite a decent level of performance. In this mode, the scalability from the transition from dual-core to quad-core models is quite clearly visible.

Testing at maximum quality settings 1920x1080 physics medium

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And already when we set the physics to the average quality level all, our tested processors literally fell into a puddle. It can be seen that physics acceleration is designed for the graphics accelerator, not the central processor.

Testing at maximum quality settings 1920x1080 physics maximum

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When moving to the maximum level of physical effects, the situation is even more deplorable and, as in the previous case, there can be no talk of comfortable performance.

 

 

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Alice: Madness Returns is a completely worthy sequel to years gone by with a fair amount of sarcasm and madness.

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The graphics in the game are really nothing. But developers can create something attractive even from the rather outdated UE3.

 

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Optimization in Alice: Madness Returns is very good, but that is if you are not destined to use a level of physics higher than the minimum. Otherwise, get ready for the brakes...

 



 

We would like to express our gratitude to all manufacturing companies that were able to provide test equipment for our tests. GPU and we hope that in the future their number will increase significantly!

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Test score

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 Rating 90% [24 vote(s)]

Game rating

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 Rating 84% [25 vote(s)]