FIFA 18 Notebook and Desktop Benchmarks

For the original German review, see here.

As we reported on the day of its official release, a multitude of buyers are currently having trouble with the soccer simulation. While Amazon customers may receive their order late due to a strike, other users complain about downloads that are not working. Even though we were spared these problems during downloading and the installation of FIFA 18 (it needs about 34 GB on the hard drive), there were various irregularities during the test.

It began with starting the game, which lead to most headaches and head shaking. Even though FIFA 18 ran flawlessly on the first test device with a GeForce GTX 980, after changing to a GeForce GTX 1060, suddenly the game did not want to start anymore at all (only the Launcher worked). The same occurred in a large part of our remaining systems with a Pascal GPU.

After some tips from various forums did not bring any improvements, in order to continue testing, we reinstalled Origin several times. And lo and behold, in the second or third try, most of the times FIFA 18 worked again. However, the error message regarding Microsoft's .NET framework, which would pop up in some places and which was also present in older FIFA titles, could not be remedied, since the developer still has not fixed this.

The fact that you can hardly find any results in the chart below (as of 9/30/2017), has to do with the restrictive installation policy by Origin and EA, which only allows a certain amount of new systems per day, as was the case in the past with other games. Even changing the graphics card uses one activation. Due to this fact, it will still take a while until we will have been able to check all of our notebooks and desktop PCs. Since the system requirements have hardly changed compared to the predecessor, FIFA 17 is a good indicator for the expected performance.

The graphics menu, which can be opened outside the game and is not very comprehensive, follows the predecessor to a large extent. Besides the resolution and the screen mode, you can only change the overall quality (4 steps) and the smoothing of the edges. Here EA uses MSAA again, which does a decent job. The remaining menu items are concerned with the frame rate and the DirectX-mode, which is new.

While the optional frame lock was completely turned off for the tests, we set DirectX on version 11.0. Although in theory, DirectX 12 brings more performance due to the lower overhead, in all the games released until now, DX12 tended towards a lower performance, which is also the case for FIFA 18 in our experience. Anyone who does not feel like tuning the graphics settings, or does not know how, can also activate the Auto mode in most settings.