Benchmarking Free to Play: World of Tanks, Dota 2, PlanetSide 2 and League of Legends Tested

Steve

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[newwindow=https://www.techspot.com/review/785-free-to-play-games-benchmarks/]https://www.techspot.com/review/785-free-to-play-games-benchmarks/[/newwindow]

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High-def screenshot would be nice too.
did not like Dota2 games engine, even watching replays has lag.
 
Regarding Path of Exile if it Wins the poll If you have to benchmark that try to get a 2 or 3 people in a party and go farm some populated place so we can see how the gpu and cpu actually deal with these situations

ty and keep up the good work
 
I would by no means call Planetside 2's graphics dated - the game came out at the end of 2012. It's pretty high up there and as demonstrated by your benchmarks, puts a lot of systems to their knees. A very fast CPU is also pretty essential as when you get into 100v100 battles having a slow CPU will make the game unplayable, and the CPU seems to be the biggest factor in overall performance of the game.
 
I would wish you to test/review Mechwarrior Online...
This game is so amazing and addictive!
 
Yea cpu benchmarks are always needed. Especially for game like PS2 with massive battles and to see does mores cores or more mhz add to fps and stability for example.
 
Path of Exile is not really graphically intensive, it's just poorly optimized. Still, it's a great game. I can play it on laptop i3 and HD 7470M discrete gpu which is shittier than IGP on medium/high without shadows.
 
Planetside 2 is extremely taxing on the CPU, especially in big fights. I would have loved a bench so I know what kind of CPU I should buy next.
 
Any chance of tossing a 780TI into the mix? I know it would max all the games, but I was hoping for a triple monitor bench...
 
HAWKEN, Warframe, WarFace, and Path of Exile. And CPU benchmarks for all the games!
 
Yea, in planetside 2 that game is heavily dependant on the CPU for alot of the power offset especially when you get into fights with around 100 people.
 
For the sake of information World of tanks is more CPU based than GPU
also WoT is limited to use only 1 CPU core (no multicore support) and max of 2 GB ram

so a GPU only benchmark for WoT is useless
 
For all the guys finding this hard to believe, this was a GPU test (there I said it).

I would by no means call Planetside 2's graphics dated - the game came out at the end of 2012. It's pretty high up there and as demonstrated by your benchmarks, puts a lot of systems to their knees. A very fast CPU is also pretty essential as when you get into 100v100 battles having a slow CPU will make the game unplayable, and the CPU seems to be the biggest factor in overall performance of the game.

Bringing a lot of system to their knees is not a measurement of graphics quality. The PlanetSide 2 graphics are dated I don’t know how you could dispute otherwise when comparing it to games such as Battlefield 4 and Crysis 3. Still as we said graphics quality is not a measurement of overall game quality, we merely made an observation.

For the sake of information World of tanks is more CPU based than GPU also WoT is limited to use only 1 CPU core (no multicore support) and max of 2 GB ram so a GPU only benchmark for WoT is useless

When testing WoT appeared to use more than a single core, I will look into this shortly. As for your comment about a GPU only benchmark being useless, well that’s utter nonsense for two obvious reasons. First of all if it were useless then why did we see such a massive performance difference between the R7 260X and the GTX 750 Ti or even the R9 270 for example? Kind of seems like more relevant than useless information to me.

FINALLY one last point I would like to make and I really can’t stress this enough, picking the right GPU for gaming opposed to the right CPU is significantly more difficult. I have been putting together these gaming benchmarks for over 5 years now and in recent times if there is one thing I have noticed it’s that the results are almost always the same. BUY an i5!

99% of the time the AMD processors get smoked and the Core i5 delivers the exact same performance as the Core i7 and it’s been that way since Nehalem was released. So for all you confused readers wanting to know what CPU to buy for gaming we suggest the Core i5-4670K if you plan to overclock for $240 or the Core i5-4670 for $220 if you don’t.

For those on a tighter budget the Core i3 range always seems to do well in our game tests so seek out the Core i3-4340 for $160 or the Core i3-4130 for $125. We are not Intel biased, this is simply the truth.
 
For the sake of information World of tanks is more CPU based than GPU
also WoT is limited to use only 1 CPU core (no multicore support) and max of 2 GB ram

so a GPU only benchmark for WoT is useless
While WOT is very taxing on CPU, GPU is hugely important. Just read anywhere on wot forums for people and FPS, or you could simply look at the benchmarks provided here.
 
For all the guys finding this hard to believe, this was a GPU test (there I said it).

For the sake of information World of tanks is more CPU based than GPU also WoT is limited to use only 1 CPU core (no multicore support) and max of 2 GB ram so a GPU only benchmark for WoT is useless

When testing WoT appeared to use more than a single core, I will look into this shortly. As for your comment about a GPU only benchmark being useless, well that’s utter nonsense for two obvious reasons. First of all if it were useless then why did we see such a massive performance difference between the R7 260X and the GTX 750 Ti or even the R9 270 for example? Kind of seems like more relevant than useless information to me.

FINALLY one last point I would like to make and I really can’t stress this enough, picking the right GPU for gaming opposed to the right CPU is significantly more difficult. I have been putting together these gaming benchmarks for over 5 years now and in recent times if there is one thing I have noticed it’s that the results are almost always the same. BUY and i5!

99% of the time the AMD processors get smoked and the Core i5 delivers the exact same performance as the Core i7 and it’s been that way since the Nehalem microarchitecture was released. So for all you confused readers wanting to know what CPU to buy for gaming we suggest the Core i5-4670K if you plan to overclock for $240 or the Core i5-4670 for $220 if you don’t.

For those on a tighter budget the Core i3 range always seems to do well in our game tests so seek out the Core i3-4340 for $160 or the Core i3-4130 for $125. We are not Intel bias, this is simply the truth.

WOT uses at most 1.5 cores. I have an dual core rig and it rarely shows more than 75% usage while the GPU is pegged at 60-70%. On my main i5 + 7950 rig, I still see 1 cores maxed out and 1 other core at about 50% and the other two cores are under 10% each.

The thing with testing the CPU is to let us know if our current dual core or whatever CPU is still up to the task of having it's GPU upgraded from say a 550ti to a 770 or something like that. Also, we all have budgets to keep and if we can get away with an i3/FX + 770 instead of an i5+760, it would be helpful.

When I was debating whether to get an 7850 as an upgrade from my 7750 for my old E5200 dual core, I had to wrestle with the issue of CPU bottleneck and in the end, I sold my 7850 since it wouldn't really be an improvement given the CPU bottlenecks the system was facing.

If testing CPU is too much, maybe a simpler test would be 1 Pentium, 2 i3's (pre-post Haswell), 2 i5's (Pre-Post Haswell), 2 i7's (Pre Post Haswell), 1 each from the FX line, 1 Kaveri and 1 Phenom II. Throw in a Core Duo + Core 2 Quad if you have time :)
 
For all the guys finding this hard to believe, this was a GPU test (there I said it).

When testing WoT appeared to use more than a single core, I will look into this shortly. As for your comment about a GPU only benchmark being useless, well that’s utter nonsense for two obvious reasons. First of all if it were useless then why did we see such a massive performance difference between the R7 260X and the GTX 750 Ti or even the R9 270 for example? Kind of seems like more relevant than useless information to me.

sorry for the misunderstanding ... not trying to offend you here
by useless I actually trying to offend WoT itself xD
it needs a special Benchmark I play the game since ages the CPU bottleneck and hardware support has huge impact on performance..
WoT forums are full with people topics (why I got low FPS on high end PC)
my point is the game engine is crazy people with mid/low end laptops getting higher FPS than a xxxx$ gaming PCs and high end GPUs like the ones in this benchmark
 
I agree having looked closer at WoT CPU utilization the engine is not taking advantage of quad-core processors. Still we proved that those with high-end systems shouldn’t have an issue playing WoT, the GTX 780 rendered an average of 106fps at 1920x1200.

The Core i7-4770K only saw about 50-60% utilization on the first core and about 20-30% on the second. So this processor is obviously overkill for this game.

The only way gamers with high-end GPU’s will run into trouble when playing WoT is with an AMD processor. It’s no secret that AMD’s core efficiency with their latest processors is poor. So with an FX-8350 for example the GTX 780 will likely be much slower though we suspect it would still provide playable performance.
 
I agree having looked closer at WoT CPU utilization the engine is not taking advantage of quad-core processors. Still we proved that those with high-end systems shouldn’t have an issue playing WoT, the GTX 780 rendered an average of 106fps at 1920x1200.

The Core i7-4770K only saw about 50-60% utilization on the first core and about 20-30% on the second. So this processor is obviously overkill for this game.

The only way gamers with high-end GPU’s will run into trouble when playing WoT is with an AMD processor. It’s no secret that AMD’s core efficiency with their latest processors is poor. So with an FX-8350 for example the GTX 780 will likely be much slower though we suspect it would still provide playable performance.

I tried a FX8320 with a 650ti boost and it was at least good for 1080p high at about 60fps. If the game schedules the threads nice, the AMD chips aren't that constrained since there is no competing for resources in the same module.

WOT is quite heavy and dependent on those 2 cores it does run on though. I saw better minimum frame rates (but I locked myself to 60fps) when I OC'd my i5 though my average didn't really go up. The main worry is if i3's and Pentiums and lower end AMD can handle the game well. It's especially bad for AMD as the game won't use more cores.
 
Forgot to mention that CPU usage gets much heavier when there are more player about, likely do to the physics calcs and movements etc
 
For all the guys finding this hard to believe, this was a GPU test (there I said it).

When testing WoT appeared to use more than a single core, I will look into this shortly. As for your comment about a GPU only benchmark being useless, well that’s utter nonsense for two obvious reasons. First of all if it were useless then why did we see such a massive performance difference between the R7 260X and the GTX 750 Ti or even the R9 270 for example? Kind of seems like more relevant than useless information to me.

sorry for the misunderstanding ... not trying to offend you here
by useless I actually trying to offend WoT itself xD
it needs a special Benchmark I play the game since ages the CPU bottleneck and hardware support has huge impact on performance..
WoT forums are full with people topics (why I got low FPS on high end PC)
my point is the game engine is crazy people with mid/low end laptops getting higher FPS than a xxxx$ gaming PCs and high end GPUs like the ones in this benchmark

That's complete bullcrap, I have a mid-high end PC and I got full 60 on max at full hd res in WOT. (altough my fps went up only after I bought an i5 and a gtx660, but mostly the gpu made the difference).
 
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