Greed: Black Border test GPU

Year of construction: 2009
Genre: RPG (Rogue/Action) / 3D / 3rd Person
developer: ClockStone Studio
Publishing house: HeadUp Games

System requirements for maximum visual quality recommended by the game websiteGPU:

The minimum

Operating system: Windows XP SP3, Vista®, Windows 7
Processor: Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz
RAM: 1 GB 
Video card: DirectX®9 compatible video adapter with 256 MB RAM Radeon HD 4470 or GeForce 8600GT
DirectX: DirectX®9
Winchester: 6.86 GB free space

Effective

Operating system: Windows XP SP3, Vista®, Windows 7
Processor: Core 2 Duo 2,66 GHz
RAM: 1.5 GB 
Video card: DirectX®9 compatible video adapter with 256 MB RAM Radeon HD 4650 or GeForce GT 220
DirectX: DirectX®9
Winchester: 6.86 GB free space

Optimal

Operating system: Windows XP SP3, Vista®, Windows 7
Processor: Core 2 Duo 3.0 GHz
RAM: 2 GB 
Video card: DirectX®9 compatible video adapter with 512 MB RAM Radeon HD 4690 or GS GeForce 8800 260
DirectX: DirectX®9
Winchester: 6.86 GB free space

Official description of the game

Greed: Black Border is a game in the best traditions of the genre. Make your way through crowds of robots, alien creatures, improve your weapons and costume

Features:
- A wide variety of levels, each available in 3 levels of difficulty and divided into 3 different scenarios with several monster types as well as large end bosses
- 3 completely different playable character classes
- Diverse, scalable Skills in 3 categories per character class - simultaneous use of all categories offers the most compelling combinations
- Increased properties with immediate effect on Gameplay
- Composite-cash and base-cash weapons, weapons and Items
- Online capable Coop multiplayer mode for 3 players

Review: Playability

In anticipation of such a long release of Diablo 3, many developers are not at a loss and have recently been actively increasing the pace of releasing games on this topic. Well, it would be dishonest to consider this product a purely Diablo clone. If you take a closer look at the storyline, then another project will begin to flash in your mind, namely Dead Space.

As in all games of this genre, we make our way through clusters of monsters, find all kinds of objects and level up our character.

But there is also a little bit of ointment that spoils this barrel of honey. The controls in Greed: Black Border are simply terrible. When you need to show maneuverability, God knows what happens. Destroying monsters does not bring any pleasure - they are not easy to kill and you always have to run from them across the game map, suffering from poor controls.

But if you are a fan of this genre, you will certainly find something unique and interesting in this game, and armed with an indestructible mouse, you can safely conquer this project.

Review: Game Graphics

The game graphics of Greed: Black Border did not lose face in front of the gaming audience and looks quite good by modern standards.

The detailing of the characters is a little lacking when you zoom in on them, but playing from such an angle is almost impossible due to the inconvenient location of the game camera.

But in general, we can conclude that the graphics in the game are quite pleasant and will not disappoint demanding gamers.

Review: Resource-intensive game

For a comfortable game, you will need a dual-core Core 2 Duo 2,66 GHz processor and 1,5 gigabytes of RAM.. The game is either poorly optimized or optimized to run on the processor rather than the video card, but the fact remains that the game has minimal video card requirements, while the processor requirements are maximum.

All video cards were tested at maximum graphics quality using the Fraps program in the most resource-intensive part of the game. We tested the lower price segment video cards at a resolution of 1024x768, the mid-range video cards at a resolution of 1280x1024, and the upper price range video cards at a resolution of 1680x1050. We tested the processor dependence on the HD5870 video card at maximum graphics quality settings.

 

Testing at maximum Low End quality settings at 1024x768 resolution

In the lower category, only a small number of video cards are not capable of handling this game.

Testing at maximum quality settings Midle End at 1280x1024 resolution

Testing at maximum High End quality settings at 1680x1050 resolution

In the lower and middle segments we see absolute parity, and only with increasing resolution the average number of frames drops slightly.

Testing processor dependence at maximum quality settings at a resolution of 1680x1050

It is very clear that the game is only capable of using the resource of dual-core processors. It is also clear that the entire performance of video cards depends on the central processor. From this we can conclude that the requirements for the graphics subsystem are minimal and everything depends on the frequency of the dual-core processor. And the higher it is, the correspondingly higher the frame rate will be. Of course, we can't say that the game is unplayable on any of the processors we tested. But such a low frame rate on the most advanced models is a little alarming.

Conclusion: This product would be quite good if it were not for the terrible controls and poor optimization in relation to the central processor.