I’ve got my DinoPC.
I’ve customised it like a pro.
I can now record in superior 4K!
So let’s turn my PC down to HD and see if I can slow it down at this humble, lowly resolution.
Cos 4K’s kind of cheating.
I’ve chosen to start this challenge off with Arma 3, which scales all the way from
very easy to ‘no you can’t run this’.
It’s a little bit different from most games, because it isn’t a game.
It’s deadly serious, as any player you’ll meet online will tell you.
It’s intended as a MILITARY SIMULATION and that means doing every thing the hard way.
GTA 5 may get away with deleting cars as they go out of site, or swapping distant trees
with cardboard cutouts.
But not with this game.
I mean, MILITARY SIMULATION.
Every bullet behaves the way it’s intended to, arcing through the air and blowing with
the wind.
They can pass through rock, wood and ground.
Fire up in the air with gay abandon, and that bullet will eventually land somewhere.
And as much as this island would benefit from some dinosaurs, you won’t find any.
Because that would just be silly.
So just remember this when it comes to the benchmarks.
It might not look like it’s rendering a lot, but it’s probably spending dozens of
frames a second accurately modelling the way the wind interacts with the hairs in your
player’s nose.
Or maybe it’s just poorly optimised.
Anyway, the new Apex expansion is set on the beautiful island of Tanoa.
It’s filled with jungles that wouldn’t look out of place in Crysis or Battlefront
2.
I first tested it on maximum settings with 4x antialiasing.
It looked great but ran at just 30 to 40 fps in the jungles.
But move over to the cities and at points it would drop to as low as 20, especially
when staring at these shipping containers.
What’s it got inside them? 3DMark software?!
So yeah, even the almighty DinoPC isn’t impervious to humble old HD gaming at uber-extreme
settings.
Lowering it down to just ULTRA but with 8x antialiasing and it held at least 60 FPS in
the jungle… but still as low as 45 when staring at the shipping containers.
Crazy, huh.
But this is boring.
Like 3kliksphilip.
Let’s add a twist to this benchmarking process!
Allow me to introduce to you my secret weapon. ...sheep.
Let’s start with a single, solitary shop, stood solemnly solo in the centre of the airfield.
This still only ran at a 70 FPS.
Maybe there’s a LAN party being simulated somewhere else on the island.
No, that didn’t help.
Oh well.
It’s a start.
Now to up it to 100!
We’ve got ourselves a nice little herd going on here.
But we see the game is now on the 60 mark, teetering on the fine line between perfectly
smooth and literally unplayable.
Woops.
Let’s up the numbers some more.
TO 500!
It’s dropped a further 20 FPS, or a drop of .05 FPS per sheep.
Not…
Baaad.
And now 1000!
Here it has only dropped by another 7 fps to 33.
A little over 1 FPS drop per 100 sheep, this game certainly has some interesting scaling
going on.
But enough of this!
Onto 2000!
And now the framerate’s down to cinematic territory.
But something else is going on here.
The game’s engine seems bugged, creating solid and rather creepy walls of sheep.
These things are impervious to bullets and even to grenades.
I’m sure this would happen in real life as well.
Don’t doubt Arma’s calculations, it knows what it’s doing.
I upped it further to 4,000, lowering the framerate to under 15 and creating yet more
weird sheep clumps.
Now, even those standing alone are impervious to bullets.
I don’t know why and am not entirely sure how to test the penetrative properties of
sheep.
I’ll leave that to the welsh.
Simulating 6,000 sheep was the turning point for this test.
The loading times considerably increased to almost 2 minutes and although I was still
getting double digit frame-rates, the sheep began super-positioning in and out of the
floor, depending on where I looked.
I’m going to name this phenomenon ‘Schrodinger’s sheep’ and have accepted, for this test,
that perhaps we’ve taken it a little too far.
So, Arma 3 has pushed my PC to the breaking point.
It stressed my CPU.
It cooked my GPU.
And lastly, it took 6,000 sheep to run out of…
…RAM.
But the challenges have only just begun!
Which other games can bring my PC to its knees at the humble HD resolution?
Post your suggestions in the comments section and I’ll see if I can do it on my poor,
poor POOR DinoPC.