Black and White 2 v.1.2 Performance Update

Final Words

The fact that Black and White 2 is a beautiful game is undeniable. The water alone is one of the absolute best water effects we've seen in any game. SM3.0 effects are put to good use, with blooms from lights in the towns or miracles creating a warm and realistic effect. The miracles are all very impressive, and each map is loaded with details. All of the little touches combine with the overall impressiveness of the towns and villager AI to create a seamless and complex gaming world.

Anyone can tell you, however, that a game's graphics do not necessarily make it good. Some of us here at AnandTech enjoy the game very much, despite flaws like glitchy creature and people AI and limited replay value, but ultimately it will be for the reader to decide whether he or she likes it or not. Luckily, it isn't our job to report on how much fun a game is, but just on the technical aspects of the graphics and performance.

Because this is more of a strategy game, the frame rates don't have to be excessively high to provide smooth game play. Whereas in a game like Battlefield 2 a minimum framerate of 30fps would be desirable, Black and White 2 could be enjoyed with a framerate of around 20fps - perhaps even lower, depending on personal preference. This being the case, for those with older monitors limited to 1280x1024 or 1600x1200 resolution, a card like the X1600 XT or 6800 GS would be the perfect choice to be able to run this game at the highest quality settings (without AA). Unfortunately, the low-end cards we tested had a lot of trouble running the game even at the lowest resolutions, so people with these cards will have to sacrifice some of the nicer quality options in order to run it. This is a disappointing prospect as we feel the game's graphics are one of its main strengths, but that's not to say the game still couldn't be enjoyed with them toned down.

If you are lucky enough to own a card that can play this game at higher resolutions with AA enabled, you will probably be very impressed. Something to note is that Black and White 2 uses a special type of in-game AA which is slightly different than other game's AA. This means that the quality of the AA is noticeably better than in most games, however the improvement comes with an equally large performance hit. We like this feature, regardless of the drop in performance, as it's another way the game puts the high-end cards to good use to make the game look even better. Those unable to run the game with AA will still find the game to be very easy on the eyes, however.

For those looking for a good God-sim game, Black and White 2 will definitely give you a fix, and it's refreshing to see this level of detail and quality in the graphics of this kind of game, or any game for that matter. Lionhead has created a game which seems like it's made for the next generation of graphics hardware, and for this they should be commended. We look forward to seeing what this game company has in store for us in the future.

Even if you're not interested in this particular game or genre, it's still useful to see how the major graphics cards fare across a wide variety of benchmarks. It's unfortunate that this game was launched with relatively poor performance with ATI cards, and it's rather odd at best for a "Get In The Game" title to actually perform "The Way It's Meant To Be Played". Ideally, optimizations to help a game perform better with different hardware platforms shouldn't be required, but that's rarely the case. Hopefully, some of the work that went into helping Lionhead improve B&W2 performance will also help ATI to offer better support and performance on other titles.