Anno 2205 Notebook Benchmarks

For the original German article, see here.

Graphics

No doubt about it: Anno 2205 is one of the most beautiful strategy/city-building games ever made. Whether from far away or several times magnified with zoom, graphically the title looks superb from almost every point of view. From the carefully designed houses to the authentic-looking vegetation, every detail is simply world-class. While older games in the series often displayed objects and people at unrealistic proportions, characters and vehicles are now properly sized in relation to buildings. The closer the player moves the camera towards the unfolding scenes, the more visible the developer's efforts become. Blue Byte has created a fanciful place where dozens of cars roam the streets and cheerful people stroll about in the park. The studio's competition rarely dreams up so much hustle and bustle.

The graphics splendor is enhanced by an optional day and night cycle, as well as distinct weather patterns and regional conditions. Over the course of the unending campaign, the player isn't just exposed to idyllic island worlds: You can also inhabit the arctic, and even colonize the moon. Because the game difficulty varies depending on the sector, the player is constantly confronted with new challenges. Thanks to the well-designed and successfully executed introduction, Anno newbies should be able to quickly figure out both the city-building aspect and the economic simulation (the combat system is just generally simple).

But back to the graphics: If we had to critique something, it would be the look of the water. Even at maximum details, the surface, waves and breakers aren't completely convincing. Still, this doesn't do much damage to the generally exquisite visuals. The game also deserves praise for its numerous settings options. Alongside resolution and image mode, the graphics menu contains 14 further possible adjustments.

For those who don't feel like going through the lengthy process of tuning, Anno 2205 offers the option to adjust the overall quality in one go. The five presets (Low to Ultra High) take care of the "small stuff." With the exception of anti-aliasing, all of the levels are well-balanced. Because anti-aliasing is already activated on the Medium preset, the game demands more of the hardware than comparable titles do. In general, Anno 2205 requires a very powerful system; the results from our benchmark tests underscore this fact. Excellent: The game doesn't need to be restarted after settings changes. As far as we can tell, all of the options are correctly applied.

In our experience, the engine (specially designed for Anno 2205) runs without any errors. Both during gaming and in the benchmark tests, we didn't experience any crashes or significant drops in performance. The little bugs in the realm of sound (radio messages sometimes cut out mid-sentence) are forgivable, as are the fairly unobtrusive appearances of better texture and polygon levels. The only thing that got on our nerves was the fact that the mouse often has issues when a 4K display is set to 3840x2180 pixels (only part of the screen is reachable). When this happens, usually it helps to change the window mode (Alt + Enter) or briefly select a different resolution.

Warning: Even with the brand new driver, notebooks with graphics switching (Optimus for Nvidia, Enduro for AMD) use the processor's chip. The user must assign the program-exe to the dedicated GPU to attain the expected level of performance. On the plus side, the game's file size is quite moderate (~13 GB download). The load times are also reasonable.