Farming Simulator 17 Notebook and Desktop Benchmarks

For the original German article, see here.

Gaming Environment

We resisted the impulse for a long, long while, but after dozens of Community e-mails we simply couldn't avoid our responsibilities any more. The Farming Simulator (Landswirtschafts-Simulator in German) has been enthusiastically adopted by a sizable fan base, that includes not just hobby farmers, but also ordinary people in search of a simple, idyllic and engaging gaming experience.

And yes, after your humble author spend a few hours messing around with mowing, manure and feeding the pigs, he truly did begin to understand the undying fascination that dedicated virtual farmers seem to love. We found it particularly clever that the game let us tune into various radio stations to provide a soundtrack for our agricultural pursuits. Thus, for example, you can pick a hip-hop channel, and cruise to the pulsing base of Jay-Z as you drive around in your tractor. It may sound pretty crazy, but it's actually quite amusing.

Technically speaking, the 17th edition of this game is a little underwhelming. Even at the highest level of detail, graphics look a little fuzzy, whether rendering characters or textures. Only the farming equipment is very sharp, almost lovingly detailed when rendered. Game physics vary between good and curiously bad, as when the Bulldog trailers take to the air behind your tractor (if hauled through a confined space of your own making). But this, too, has its own curious charm and gives the game an occasional dash of slapstick humor.

All in all the overall graphics are workmanlike, though in some situations (such as when rendering tall grass in a sunset scene) you'll see lots of atmospheric effects. That adjective -- atmospheric -- carries over into much of this game. But newbies need not worry too much about jumping late to this game. Although this is the 17th version, they'll find that its tutorials do a half-way decent job of helping them understand and manipulate its many game elements. It's our frank opinion that game navigation and most of the menus could easily be made more user-friendly and attractive. The limitations of a small developer organization clearly make themselves felt in the areas of game controls and infrastructure.

The options menu offers a wide range of choices to manage. Along with the general settings, you'll find 11 additional features beyond resolution to dig into. Among others, they include such things as HUD scaling, the visual field, brightness, image mode, and vertical synch. The most important of these is the "Hardware Profile" item, which establishes overall graphics quality via settings for Low, Medium, High, and Very High. Those who want to get under the game's hood and mess with its innards will enjoy working with the expanded graphics menus. There, you'll find nearly 20 options to manage the PC runtime environment that supports completely unique tuning and customization.

That sad, we have to take issue with some of the game's restrictions. Settings many only be altered in the main menu, but when you select Very High graphics quality, you can't see all the controls on screen. This includes anisotropic texture filtering, something that hardly impacts modern PC performance nowadays. Edge smoothing is handled using MSAA settings. While this control really helps how other games looks and play, the farming simulator is inclined to flickering when displaying game objects (particularly trees and bushes). Over time, this becomes disturbing. In addition, loading times could be faster -- at least, when reading from a hard disk.