Dead Island Performance Analysis
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On our quad-core i5 and NVIDIA GTX460 set-up we had no trouble at all in maintaining a whopping 120FPS in 720p and between 90 and 120FPS in 1080p, all with max settings enabled. That's an incredibly impressive result and the level of fluidity when running on a 120Hz display has a very positive impact on the gameplay: the sluggish feel of the controls is notably improved and the experience is all the better for it.
However, with Dead Island, this also comes with its own set of compromises. Regardless of whether the game is running on a 60Hz or 120Hz monitor, screen tearing is a constant problem. Annoyingly, there's no v-sync option in the graphics menu, nor does the available frame-rate cap seem to work as you might expect. In effect, you get a silky-smooth update but at the expense of image consistency - and the tearing can be just as bad, if not worse that what we encountered on the PS3. Thankfully, forcing v-sync in our graphics card's control panel allowed us to maintain a constant 60FPS in 1080p without issue, but really this feature should be available in via the actual game options, without the need for extra fiddling.
On console, screen-tear occurs when a frame runs over budget. In the case of Dead Island running on PC, the opposite is the case and we have what you might call a double-tear. The frame is actually being rendered in under 16ms and being displayed on-screen regardless, rather than waiting for the vertical refresh.
Despite these issues and the strange reduction in texture filtering quality, the PC version of Dead Island is clearly the best of the three. The low entry-level requirements to enable a smooth 60FPS setting in both 720p and 1080p are the clincher, while the boost in resolution manages to bring out even more detail from the artwork.
The use of low-resolution buffers is a bit of a blow to be honest, and the lack of some basic graphics configuration options in the game's menu system means that getting the most out of it requires some additional tinkering, but in the final analysis it still manages to be several levels above the consoles - mostly thanks a solid 60FPS being achievable with a range of hardware configurations. We even managed to get the game running nicely on a 2.33GHz Core 2 Duo system with an NVIDIA GeForce 9800GT (1680x1050 at around 40-50FPS).
