Kane's back, and his bald head's never looked better. Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars graphically shames its predecessors in a variety of ways. EA Los Angeles made tremendous use of shaders that make the atmosphere pulse with life and give the world an organic feel. Fields of Tiberium irradiate the ground with a sickly green glow, and the sky takes on strange hues that ebb with the constant flashes of battle. What makes it even better? Exceedingly modest system requirements. Command & Conquer 3 looks fantastic on a sub-$1000 rig.
We tested Command & Conquer 3 on an eight-player skirmish map called the Rocktagon. Using a 30-second FRAPs run, we replayed the invasion and destruction of an enemy base using an array of Nod forces. Our final results are the average of three runs.
Don't be surprised if you see some very low results, as Command & Conquer 3 has a frame rate cap of 30 frames per second. From what we can tell, the game seems to base the simulation speed off of how many frames are rendered. Ideally, you'd want to maintain a constant frame rate of 30, but we found that the game is more than playable at a decent pace in the low 20s. Once you dip into the low teens, though, the game becomes unbearably slow, and effectively turns into an RTS without the real-time aspect.
Game Settings
You don’t need much of a computer to run Command & Conquer 3 well, but you’re still going to have dial down a few settings if your computer isn’t on the bleeding edge.
Graphics
Command & Conquer 3 looks great and doesn’t require the latest and greatest in terms of GPU power. We tested out 16 cards to help you narrow down your search.
CPU
Command & Conquer 3 doesn't ask for much in terms of processing power if you've got an Intel Core 2. But if you're putting along on a low clock speed Athlon 64 or Pentium 4 you might want to move up to something a little quicker.
Memory
The game requires 512MB of RAM, but we recommend you get a bit more. To find the sweet spot, we tested the game out with 512MB, 1GB, 2GB, and even 4GB of system memory.
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