Alien: Isolation Benchmarked: Graphics & CPU Performance

Classified as a survival horror/stealth game instead of an action shooter, Alien: Isolation differs significantly from last year's Alien: Colonial Marines in that there is just 1 Alien who can't be killed, requiring you to employ stealth tactics.

Although the game features some weapons, they will only be effective against the human occupants and android "Working Joes". Apparently the Alien AI has been programmed not to follow a predetermined path simply rather hunt the histrion using sight, sound and smell, which should make for enough of pants-wetting moments.

The game sounds like a smash if you're comfortable with soiling yourself but we're more interested in Alien: Isolation'due south performance when running at max quality and varying resolutions.

Creative Assembly has designed Alien: Isolation for five platforms (PC along with PlayStation 3/4 and Xbox 360/One) and the developer says that it has created its ain in-house game engine, though there doesn't seem to be much information about it (nosotros haven't even seen a proper noun for information technology).

"Building a new engine is a really scary thing to exercise but it immune us to build the technology around what nosotros wanted to do," says lead fine art designer McKellan . "The lighting behaves the way nosotros desire it to, for case."

Besides read: Alien: Isolation Review: An intense horror game and heartfelt tribute

The engine is said to support multiple CPU cores (perhaps up to four) and the game uses many advanced rendering technologies such as tessellation, contact hardening shadows, BC7-compressed textures and HDAO+, which should be fun to test across a few dozen hardware configurations.

Testing Methodology

Nosotros used the latest AMD and Nvidia drivers on 34 DirectX 11 graphics card configurations from both companies roofing all cost ranges. Our test rig was outfitted with the Intel Cadre i7-4770K to remove CPU bottlenecks that could influence loftier-end GPU scores.

Although we usually rely on Fraps to record upwards to 90 seconds of gameplay for our benchmark data, Artistic Assembly has provided u.s.a. with an easier method that is besides more accurate. The game features a hidden built in benchmark that tin can exist enabled past adding the -criterion command to the shortcut. By creating a batch file it'due south possible to execute multiple runs using different quality settings.

The benchmark features five stages which have been named tessellation, lab room flyby, volumetric light, large shadowcaster and lab room. For the most part, we found the frame rates very like throughout and recorded the average from all 5 tests.

Anti-aliasing was set up to SMAA T2x, texture filtering was set to Anisotropic 16x while the level of detail, particles, shadow mapping and streaming texture heap size were all on ultra. Additionally, screen space ambient apoplexy was set to HDAO+, DoF was turned on, as was motility blur and multithreaded shadow rendering.

We tested Alien: Isolation at three desktop display resolutions: 1680x1050, 1920x1200 and 2560x1600 using DX11. Since Alien: Isolation is designed for consoles as well as PC we just tested with the maximum possible in-game quality settings.