The Vanishing of Ethan Carter test GPU

BASIC GAME INFORMATION

 

Year of construction: 2014
Genre: Adventure, weird fiction horror
developer: The Astronauts
Publisher: Nordic Games Publishing

 

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a mystical adventure game inspired by the creepy pulp novels of the early 20th century. The development is led by The Astronauts studio, consisting of former People Can Fly employees who once gave us such masterpieces as Bulletstorm and Painkiller. Well, who knows, these people know a lot about exciting plot presentation. However, to be completely immersed in the atmosphere, you should play The Vanishing of Ethan Carter alone, wearing headphones and sitting in pitch darkness.

You play the role of a detective who can visualize murder scenes thanks to his psychic abilities. This time he will have to investigate the case of a kidnapped boy, hoping to save him before it is too late. The search led our hero to a picturesque mountainous area, in the vastness of which he happened to discover the mutilated body of one of the kidnappers. Using your skills, as well as a set of modern gadgets, you will find out why the local region is littered with corpses, what kind of ancient force prevails here and what the fate of the kidnapped boy is.

THE GRAFICAL PART

This subsection of our review highlights the main graphical aspects of this game. Particular attention is paid to the version of the graphics engine used, the version of the API used, graphic settings and the quality of development of the main visual aspects.

Supported OS and graphics API

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is supported by major operating systems Windows, which includes Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8. Other operating systems are not currently supported by developers and will not be supported. 

 

The primary and primary graphics API for The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is DirectX 9. 

Game engine

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is based on the Unreal Engine 3 game engine. The first version of the Unreal Engine 3 engine was released in 2006. This cross-platform engine was designed with the next generation of consoles PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and personal computers in mind, using modern rendering systems DirectX 9, OpenGL 2 and OpenGL 3. Support for DirectX 10 version was quickly added with the release of Windows Vista and shaders version 4.0. Due to the widespread use of multiprocessor systems, the engine uses two parallel main threads - the main thread, which is mainly responsible for the game process and the rendering thread. In addition to the two main threads, secondary ones can be called, which perform one-time tasks. Support for multi-threaded dynamic data loading has appeared, such as loading a "location" directly when moving along it in order to save resources. 

 

The updated graphics engine supports most modern technologies, including HDR, per-pixel lighting, dynamic shadows, shaders version 4.0, geometry shaders. The graphics pipeline itself was transferred to the control of shaders. The Karma physics subsystem was abandoned in favor of another called PhysX from AGEIA. Later, AGEIA released a set of additional libraries for the game, allowing you to use all the capabilities of your physical system.

The FaceFX mechanism is responsible for the animation of the characters' faces. The EAX system has been updated to version 5. Added SpeedTree support for tree generation. The emphasis was placed on additive geometry, but support for subtractive geometry was not abandoned. The disadvantage of subtractive geometry is primarily the much longer lighting calculation. A new UnrealEd editor has been introduced, rewritten using wxWidgets. In this version there has been another evolution of the graphic component. So, among other things, an Ambient occlusion post-processing filter was added, which improves 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. 

 

In March 2010, an announcement of new engine features was published, which were presented at the Game Developers Conference 2010. One of the main innovations is the new Unreal Lightmass lighting calculation system, which uses global illumination without losing functions 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. 

 

Added our own means of distributing user content - Unreal Content Browser, Unreal Master appeared Control Program is a new master server for updating clients and maintaining global statistics, which is already used in Gears of War 2. In connection with the innovations, Epic Games China planned to demonstrate the use of the engine for massively multiplayer online games.

In 2011, Epic Games showed a video about the latest updates made to the engine - Samaritan. The press and players began calling it "Unreal Engine 3.9". In the next update, the third generation engine received support for DirectX 11, as well as a huge number of related technologies. Was only used in Unreal Championship 2. 

Advanced Game Settings

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter has a wide range of graphic settings. You can also change the settings for four main sub-items - low medium and high. Basic and additional settings are located in two different sub-sections of the menu and launcher.

        

Below we have provided screenshots of the game at various graphics settings, where our readers can see the difference between the minimum, medium and maximum graphics quality settings. 

Various quality modes

The difference between graphics settings is visible in the quality of detail and drawing distance.

Comparison of FullHD and 4K

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter looks good in 4K if you have the appropriate device.

Comparison of anti-aliasing modes

Activating various types of full-screen anti-aliasing does not completely eliminate surface unevenness, leaving visible jaggies. The MSAA mode looks the best quality.

General visual design and game physics

 The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a very beautiful game, despite the fact that the game is based on outdated DirectX 9. The surrounding area looks simply amazing, and it’s hard to believe that this is possible Unreal Engine 3.

 

In fact, apart from the magnificent landscapes, there is practically nothing significant in the game, because this is a genre for amateurs, and not for avid gamers.

 

Next, we will move directly to gaming tests and determine what impact this game has on modern computer hardware. 

TEST PART

Test GPU

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 average and minimum FPS were taken as performance indicators. Below is a video of the test segment:   

 Our video cards were tested at separate screen resolutions of 1920x1080, 2560x1600 and 3840x2160 at maximum graphics quality settings allowed by The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. SLI does not work in the game, and AMD CrossFireX has sufficient support, showing excellent scalability. 

Testing at resolution 1920x1080

      

Testing at maximum quality settings 1920x1080 

  

With these settings An acceptable FPS indicator was shown by video cards of the Radeon HD 6870 or GeForce GTX 560 level. The optimal solution would be video cards of the Radeon HD 6870 or GeForce GTX 580 level.

Testing at 2560x1600 resolution

       

Testing at maximum quality settings 2560x1600

 

With these settings An acceptable FPS indicator was shown by video cards of the Radeon HD 6950 or GeForce GTX 680 level. The optimal solution would be video cards of the Radeon HD 6970 or GeForce GTX 680 level.

Testing at resolution 3840x2160

      

Testing at maximum quality settings 3840x2560

 

With these settings An acceptable FPS indicator was shown by video cards of the Radeon R9 280X or GeForce GTX 780 Ti level. The optimal solution would be level video cards Radeon R9 280X and higher.

Testing of video memory consumed by the game was carried out by the program MSI Afterburner. The indicator was based on results on top video cards from AMD and NVIDIA with separate screen sizes 1920x1080 and 2560x1600 with different anti-aliasing settings.

Testing at maximum memory quality settings GPU

 

The recommended amount of video memory usage for a resolution of 1920x1080 will be 1024 MB of video memory, for a resolution of 2560x1600 - 1280 MB of video memory and for a resolution of 3840x2160 about 2048 MB of video memory. 

CPU test

      

We tested processor dependence on 15 models of basic configurations that are relevant today. The test was carried out in those places where the video card value for the game is minimal and its load was less than 99%, this time at a resolution of 1920x1080 with maximum graphics quality settings. 

Testing at maximum quality settings 1920x1080 

 

CPU performance in the game is quite adequate.

Loading of processor coresat maximum quality settings 1920x1080 Intel% 

 

Loading of processor cores at maximum quality settings 1920x1080 AMD% 

 

The game is capable of supporting up to 8 computing threads, but is not able to normally use more than 4 cores.

RAM test

The test was carried out on the basic configuration of Core i 7 3970X@4.9 GHz with 16GB DDR3 2400 MGz pre-installed memory. The entire used operational memory was taken as an indicator. The RAM test on the entire system was carried out on various test benches without launching third-party applications (browsers, etc.).

Testing the game's RAM consumption at various quality settings 

 

As we can see, with various quality settings, the amount of RAM consumed in The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is at the level of 2000-2500 megabytes.  

Testing system RAM consumption  

 

On a 4GB system, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter consumes about 3.2GB of RAM. In the presence of a system with 8 gigabytes, the RAM consumption of all RAM was 3.9 gigabytes. With a 16 GB system, the total memory consumption was almost 4.7 gigabytes.   

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