The Crew Benchmarked
For the original German article, see here.
Game Engine
The Crew was developed by the little known studio, Ivory Tower, which is comprised of racing game experts who were involved in the production of games like Test Drive Unlimited. The team, based in France, employs the Babel engine for their first game. As expected for a game of 2014, the engine uses DirectX 11.
The graphics quality is good considering the size of the world. Although a few textures could be sharper and some of the passersby could be more detailed, we believe that The Crew delivers an immersive world. The beautiful day-night change and many small details (dirt and scratches on the car) contribute to the appeal of the game. Of course, there is no dearth of effects: whether it be particles, reflections or shadows - the graphics are always appealing. The cutscenes and detailed landscape round off an already impressive package.
Overall, the game seems to have been produced with a clear goal in mind. In contrast to Assassin's Creed Unity and Far Cry 4, the engine gives us a good, clean impression. At medium settings, the details are quite nice, but we were surprised to find out that even at high AA settings, the borders are not very smooth and at max settings the picture still flickers. The game engine supports FXAA, MSAA and the Nvidia exclusive TXAA. Also on-board are modern features like Ambient Occlusion and HBAO+ (which is reserved for Nvidia chips, but should work with AMD). The graphics menu reveals various options, whether it be for resolution, vertical synchronization, brightness or picture mode. Top: all settings are accepted without a restart.
We do not like the fps limit built into the game, like in Need for Speed Rivals. Depending on the settings, the game runs at 30 or 60 fps. The latter should suffice even demanding games. A note about Rivals: the controls and menus are not great. For example, to get to the menu, you have to press U or +, which is not very intuitive. Overall, the game feels a lot like an arcade game and the control of most cars is easy.
During our benchmarks, most of the servers were online. Now and then, the game had to be turned off due to updates or other tweaks (mistakes logging in). We did not have any crashes. Lags or performance drops during online play was not noticeable.
Benchmark
As you can see in the video below, the benchmark consists of a 45 second race to Detroit. The performance in the benchmark hints to how the game will run on average and as such we should achieve at least 30-35 fps and it really gets to be fun above 40 fps.
We use the "Low", "Medium", "High" and "Ultra" presets. The Nvidia GPUs have slightly different settings: the highest settings for TXAA and HBAO+ are used. For better comparisons and to have a level playing field, we switched to 4x MSAA and SSAO+, which is standard for both Intel and AMD. Due to the varying illumination (day-night cycle) and the fluctuating traffic, the benchmark results are not always consistent. Depending on the conditions, the fps score changes by a few points.
Results
The hardware hunger of open world games is neither low nor too high. Although a high-end GPU is required for max settings (GeForce GTX 870M or Radeon R9 M290X) but a resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 pixels and high details can be run with a GTX 765M or a GTX 850M quite fluidly. At normal details and a resolution of 1,366 x 768 pixels, the system requires a middle-class GPU like the GT 750M. Weaker GPUs like the GeForce GT 740M are more suited for the "Low" preset (1,280 x 720 pixels). Pity: the DirectX-11 Intel IGPs are far too slow (HD Graphics 4000, 4600 etc.).
The Crew | |
1920x1080 Ultra Video Preset (modified) AA:4x MS 1920x1080 High Video Preset AA:FX 1366x768 Medium Video Preset AA:FX 1280x720 Low Video Preset | |
GeForce GTX 980, 3770K | |
Radeon R9 290X, 4790K, Intel SSD 530 Series SSDSC2BW240A | |
GeForce GTX 980M, 4700MQ | |
Radeon R9 280X, 3770K | |
GeForce GTX 880M, 4700MQ | |
GeForce GTX 970M, 4700MQ | |
GeForce GTX 780M, 4700MQ | |
Radeon R9 M290X, 4700MQ | |
GeForce GTX 870M, 4700MQ | |
GeForce GTX 770M, 4700MQ | |
GeForce GTX 860M, 4700MQ | |
GeForce GTX 765M, 4700MQ | |
GeForce GTX 850M, 4340M | |
GeForce GT 750M, 4702MQ | |
Radeon R7 512 Cores (Kaveri Desktop), A10-7850K, Samsung SSD 470 Series MZ-5PA256/EU | |
Iris Pro Graphics 5200, 4750HQ, Intel SSD 525 Series SSDMCEAC180B3 | |
GeForce GT 640M, 2637M, Lite-On LMT-256M3M | |
GeForce GT 740M, 4200M | |
GeForce GT 720M, 4200M, WDC Scorpio Blue WD10JPVX-22JC3T0 | |
GeForce GT 630M, 3720QM, Seagate Momentus 7200.5 ST9750420AS | |
HD Graphics 4600, 4700MQ |
Test Systems
Four of our test models are from Schenker technologies (mysn.de):
- W504 (Core i7-4700MQ, 8 GB DDR3, GeForce GTX 860M, GTX 870M, GTX 880M, GTX 970M, GTX 980M, Radeon R9 M290X)
- W503 (Core i7-4700MQ, 8 GB DDR3, GeForce GTX 765M, GTX 770M, GTX 780M)
- M504 (Core i5-4340M, 8 GB DDR3, GeForce GTX 850M)
- M503 (Core i7-4702MQ, 8 GB DDR3, GeForce GT 750M)
These notebooks all use Windows 7 64 bit.
Other test models provided by Nvidia:
- HP Envy 15-j011sg (Core i5-4200M, 12 GB DDR3, GeForce GT 740M)
- MSI CX61-i572M281BW7 (Core i5-4200M, 8 GB DDR3, GeForce GT 720M)
- Acer Aspire Timeline Ultra M3-581TG (Core i7-2637M, 4GB DDR3, Geforce GT 640M)
Intel provided:
- Schenker S413 (Core i7-4750HQ, 8 GB DDR3, Iris Pro Graphics 5200)
The desktop PCs use the CPUs/APUs from Intel and AMD, SSDs from Micron, Intel and Samsung, mainboards from Intel and Asus and graphics cards from Nvidia and AMD.
The GPU drivers: Nvidia 344.75, AMD 14.11.2 Beta, Intel 10.18.10.3960