Playerunknown's Battlegrounds - Laptop and Desktop Benchmarks

For the original German review, see here.

While most shooter games are geared toward mindless action and - if at all - only demand little strategy, PUBG presents itself as a sophisticated survival experience with many surprises and suspenseful moments.

The basic idea is explained quickly: Up to 100 players jump out of a plane onto a deserted island (at a self-ordained time), and they have to struggle through zones that get increasingly tighter. To defend and protect themselves against other players, diverse objects, such as weapons, weapon attachments, armor and other upgrades can be looted in the many houses, huts, and factory buildings on the island.

The pleasant thing about PUBG is that it allows creating a very individual gaming style. Although the title can be played as a tough shooter experience, stealth fans who prefer to progress slowly through the gigantic map and mostly avoid battles also have a good, if not better chance to take a top position. The deadly energy field that decreases the battlefield every few minutes adds tempo to the game and even forces notorious campers to move forward at some point.

Of course, the early access status of PUBG is soon noticed in many aspects. Thus, we not only discovered graphics errors and a strange collision behavior during almost 20 test rounds, but we also found other bugs (lying low suddenly did not function, objects in the air, etc.) that were largely tolerable and only lessened the gaming fun marginally. The same is true for the problems that occurred in the main menu (incorrect menu scaling, connection loss, etc.).

Despite the named shortcomings, PUBG makes a considerably more developed impression than the badly programmed and optimized Day-Z at the time. For example, we were never thrown back into the lobby during a mission. We only experienced a total crash once while changing the settings.

Talking about settings: PUBG offers a clearly arranged graphics menu that has buttons for resolution, screen mode, and brightness in the upper area. Diverse controls for details are further below this and range from anti-aliasing (not specified in detail) up to View Distance. An optional Motion Blur is also present. We left the default rate at 100 in the Screen Scale option for all tests. The five presets that allow adapting the total quality in one step, and which also served as the basis for our benchmarks, are particularly handy.

The graphics make a mixed impression. On the positive side, we had a dense vegetation in the near field (fades out at some point), and a far range of view - alongside the different times of day and weather conditions, this creates a pretty lighting atmosphere.