Fable Legends test GPU

Release date: canceled
Platforms: PC
Game genre:RPG
Publisher: Microsoft
developer: Lionhead Studios

Fable Legends is a canceled video game developed for Xbox One and PC by Lionhead Studios. The game should have offered to share the classic gameplay for the series in a cooperative playthrough with your friends. But even in a single-player game, the player could not travel alone - he would be accompanied by three computer-controlled characters.

On March 7, 2016, Microsoft announced that the game was being cancelled. The reasons have not yet been revealed, but the company has emphasized that it will only focus and invest in games that players want to see.

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.

Fable Legends is only supported Windows 10. Other operating systems are not currently supported by developers and will never be supported. 

The priority and main graphics API for Fable Legends is DirectX 12.  

The basis for Unreal Tournament is the Unreal Engine 4 game engine, developed and supported by Epic Games. This is the first game created on this engine and should simply amaze everyone with its stunning graphics. Judging by the screenshots, the developers would quite praise the previous versions of the engine, because... In the horror genre, the picture is not in the foreground. It is important to establish artificial intelligence, called the Director, which influences the gameplay by adapting to the level of players and changing game parameters. Thanks to his work, each playthrough of the game is unique and inimitable, which increases the replayability of the game.

The first game created on the engine, Unreal, appeared in 1998. Since then, various versions of this game engine have been used in more than a hundred games, including Deus Ex, Dishonored, Lineage II, Thief: Deadly Shadows, Postal 2, the Brothers in Arms series, Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, as well as in the famous game series Unreal and Unreal Tournament from Epic Games themselves. Being primarily adapted for first-person shooters, the engine was also used to create games of other genres.  

Written in the high-level C++ language, Unreal Engine 4 enables the creation of games for most operating systems and platforms: Microsoft Windows, Linux, Mac OS and Mac OS X, Xbox, Xbox 360, PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, PlayStation 3, Wii, Dreamcast and Nintendo GameCube consoles. In December, Mark Rein demonstrated the Unreal Engine 3 engine running on the iPod Touch and iPhone 3GS. In March 2010, the engine was demonstrated running on the Palm Pre communicator, which is based on the webOS mobile platform.

To simplify porting, the engine uses a modular system of dependent components: it supports various rendering systems (Direct3D, OpenGL, Pixomatic; previously supported were Glide API, S3 Metal, PowerVR SGL), sound playback (EAX, OpenAL, DirectSound3D; previously supported were A3D), text-to-speech playback tools, speech recognition (only for Xbox360, PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Windows, also planned for Linux and Mac), modules for working with the network and support for various input devices.

The following technologies are supported for online play: Windows Live, Xbox Live, and GameSpy, including up to 64 players (clients) simultaneously. Although the development tools do not officially include support for a large number of clients on a single server, the engine has been used to create MMORPG games. One of the most famous representatives of the genre, Lineage II, uses the Unreal Engine. 

Fable Legends has a fairly wide range of graphic settings. There are no basic settings, only advanced ones.

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. 

The difference between the various settings is quite discernible.

Anti-aliasing in the game completely eliminates all “roughness” of surfaces, although even without it they are practically invisible.

The picture in the Fable Legends game is beautiful, colorful, but nothing more. DirectX 12 in this game essentially does not bring anything new in terms of technology and the main visual emphasis was placed on a fairy-tale setting.

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

Our graphics cards were tested at separate screen resolutions of 1920x1080, 2560x1600 and 3840x2160 at very high and maximum graphics quality settings allowed by Fable Legends. AMD CrossFireX and SLI are not supported by the game. The game has an internal FPS limit of 60 frames.

Testing at very high quality settings 1920x1080 

With these settings, video cards of the Radeon HD 7950 or GeForce GTX 760 level showed acceptable FPS. The optimal solutions would be Radeon HD 7970 or GeForce GTX 680.

Testing at very high quality settings 2560x1440

With these settings, video cards of the Radeon R9 380X or GeForce GTX 960 level showed acceptable FPS. The optimal solutions will be  Radeon R9 380X or GeForce GTX 960 4G.

Testing at very high quality settings 3840x2160

With these settings, an acceptable FPS indicator was shown by video cards of the Radeon R9 Nano or GeForce GTX 980 level. The optimal solutions will be Radeon R9 Fury X or GeForce GTX 980 Ti.  

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 2560x1440 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 3076 MB of video memory, for a resolution of 2560x1440 - 4096 MB of video memory and for a resolution of 3840x2160 about 6144 MB of video memory. 

We tested processor dependence on 16 models of basic configurations that are relevant today. The test was carried out in those places where the value of the video card for the game is minimal and its load was less than 99%, this time at a resolution of 1920x1080.

Testing at maximum quality settings 1920x1080 

The processor performance in the game is sufficient, but on AMD it is significantly lower.

Loading of processor coresat maximum quality settings 1920x1080 Intel% 

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

Fable Legends uses up to 8 computing threads.

The test was carried out on the basic configuration of Core i 7 5960X@4.6 GHz with 32 GB DDR4 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 Fable Legends is within 2500 megabytes.

Testing system RAM consumption  

On a 6GB system, Fable Legends consumes all 5.7GB of RAM. In the presence of a system with 8 gigabytes, the RAM consumption of all RAM was 6.5 gigabytes. With a 16 GB system, the total memory consumption was almost 7 GB. And with 32 gigabytes of RAM, the system consumes 7.5 gigabytes of RAM.