Farming Simulator 17 Notebook and Desktop Benchmarks
For the original German article, see here.
Gaming Environment
We resisted the impulse for a long, long while, but after dozens of Community e-mails we simply couldn't avoid our responsibilities any more. The Farming Simulator (Landswirtschafts-Simulator in German) has been enthusiastically adopted by a sizable fan base, that includes not just hobby farmers, but also ordinary people in search of a simple, idyllic and engaging gaming experience.
And yes, after your humble author spend a few hours messing around with mowing, manure and feeding the pigs, he truly did begin to understand the undying fascination that dedicated virtual farmers seem to love. We found it particularly clever that the game let us tune into various radio stations to provide a soundtrack for our agricultural pursuits. Thus, for example, you can pick a hip-hop channel, and cruise to the pulsing base of Jay-Z as you drive around in your tractor. It may sound pretty crazy, but it's actually quite amusing.
Technically speaking, the 17th edition of this game is a little underwhelming. Even at the highest level of detail, graphics look a little fuzzy, whether rendering characters or textures. Only the farming equipment is very sharp, almost lovingly detailed when rendered. Game physics vary between good and curiously bad, as when the Bulldog trailers take to the air behind your tractor (if hauled through a confined space of your own making). But this, too, has its own curious charm and gives the game an occasional dash of slapstick humor.
All in all the overall graphics are workmanlike, though in some situations (such as when rendering tall grass in a sunset scene) you'll see lots of atmospheric effects. That adjective -- atmospheric -- carries over into much of this game. But newbies need not worry too much about jumping late to this game. Although this is the 17th version, they'll find that its tutorials do a half-way decent job of helping them understand and manipulate its many game elements. It's our frank opinion that game navigation and most of the menus could easily be made more user-friendly and attractive. The limitations of a small developer organization clearly make themselves felt in the areas of game controls and infrastructure.
The options menu offers a wide range of choices to manage. Along with the general settings, you'll find 11 additional features beyond resolution to dig into. Among others, they include such things as HUD scaling, the visual field, brightness, image mode, and vertical synch. The most important of these is the "Hardware Profile" item, which establishes overall graphics quality via settings for Low, Medium, High, and Very High. Those who want to get under the game's hood and mess with its innards will enjoy working with the expanded graphics menus. There, you'll find nearly 20 options to manage the PC runtime environment that supports completely unique tuning and customization.
That sad, we have to take issue with some of the game's restrictions. Settings many only be altered in the main menu, but when you select Very High graphics quality, you can't see all the controls on screen. This includes anisotropic texture filtering, something that hardly impacts modern PC performance nowadays. Edge smoothing is handled using MSAA settings. While this control really helps how other games looks and play, the farming simulator is inclined to flickering when displaying game objects (particularly trees and bushes). Over time, this becomes disturbing. In addition, loading times could be faster -- at least, when reading from a hard disk.
By contrast, with about 4 GB to download and a 7 GB disk footprint, the game is delightfully compact. As compared to other modern games, this is far less than the typical 30-plus GB you'll find. The retail version of the game comes on a DVD, but surprisingly does not have to be tied to a specific online account. Its straightforward activation requires only entering the product key over the Internet. Our testing was based on the 35 Euro and presumably identical Steam version.
Benchmark
We measured the frame rate using the FRAPS tool for the game map entry named "Goldcrest Valley." As you can see in the accompanying video we captured, this features a sprint from one of its four walls out to the Case IH 1660 Axial-Flow harvester combine, and a drive with this bright-red mechanical monster around the field. Because of the graphics effects involved (dust, flying straw, and more) this graphic sequence provides an effective "worst case scenario" for putting the game through its paces. If you can get this scene to benchmark at 35 fps or better, your system can handle anything the game might ever throw your way.
Tip: to run the game at 60 fps or faster, you must not only deactivate vertical synchronization, you will also have to monkey around with the game.xml file (usually resides in C:UsersxxxDocumentsmy gamesFarmingSimulator2017). After you open that file in a Windows text editor (like Notepad) you need only change the item therein that reads <controls>false</controls> to <controls>true</controls> instead. After that, if you hit the F3 key during gameplay, it will be locked into 60-fps mode until you restart the game, or until you make another settings change.
Results
Owners of older or weaker notebook PC seldom find reasons for joy when playing state-of-the-art games. It doesn't matter if you're playing Mafia 3, Deus Ex Mankind Divided, Mirror's Edge Catalyst or The Division: low-end graphics cards like an HD Graphics 4600 or the GeForce GT 720M are overwhelmed, even at low detail settings and a modest resolution of only 1280 x 720. Farming Simulator 17 is a different kettle of fish. You can play satisfactorily at medium detail settings and a resolution of 1366 x 768 on an HD Graphics 4600 GPU.
To achieve a tolerable gaming experience at 1920 x 1080 resolution with Medium presets, your rig should include nothing a real gaming GPU (a GeForce 920M or better). Somewhat more capable models like the GeForce 940M can handle the High preset. But for a combination of Full HD and the Very High preset, you'd want something at least at the level of a GeForce GTX 950M or GTX 860M.
If you want to turn the Farming Simulator at higher 3K - 4K resolutions (3840 x 2160) and the Very High presets, you'll need something like a GeForce GTX 880M or a GTX 965M for fluid gameplay. A close look at the Bechmark Table also makes it clear that the CPU can become a limiting factor on systems with leading-edge/bleeding-edge GPUs.
Farming Simulator 17 | |
3840x2160 High Preset AA:2xMS AF:2x 1920x1080 Very High Preset AA:4xMS AF:4x 1920x1080 High Preset AA:2xMS AF:2x 1920x1080 Medium Preset 1366x768 Medium Preset 1280x720 Low Preset | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 (Desktop), 4790K | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Mobile, 6820HK | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti, 4790K | |
AMD Radeon R9 Fury, 4790K | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980, 6700K | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 (Desktop), 6700K | |
AMD Radeon RX 480 (Desktop), 4790K | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970, 4790K | |
AMD Radeon RX 470 (Desktop), 4790K | |
AMD Radeon R9 290X, 4790K | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M, 4700MQ | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M, 4700MQ | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 880M, 4700MQ | |
AMD Radeon R7 370, 4790K | |
AMD Radeon RX 460 (Desktop), 4790K | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 965M, 6700HQ | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 870M, 4700MQ | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M, 4720HQ | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 860M, 4700MQ | |
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950M, 6700HQ | |
NVIDIA GeForce 940MX, 6700HQ | |
NVIDIA GeForce 940M, 5700HQ | |
NVIDIA GeForce 920M, 2970M | |
NVIDIA GeForce GT 720M, 4200M | |
Intel HD Graphics 4600, 4700MQ |
Overview
Test Systems
Desktop-PCs | Platform I | Platform II |
---|---|---|
Mainboard | Asus Z170-A | Asus Z97-Deluxe |
Processor | Intel Core i7-6700K (Skylake) | Intel Core i7-4790K (Haswell) |
Graphics card | Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 (6 GB GDDR5) Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 (4 GB GDDR5) |
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 (8 GB GDDR5X) Asus GeForce GTX 980 Ti (6 GB GDDR5) XFX Radeon R9 Fury (4 GB HBM) Sapphire Radeon R9 290X (4 GB GDDR5) Sapphire Radeon R9 280X (3 GB GDDR5) MSI Radeon R7 370 (2 GB GDDR5) |
RAM | 2x 8 GB DDR4-2133 | 2x 4 GB DDR3-1600 |
Storage | Crucial MX100 SSD (256 GB) Crucial M500 SSD (480 GB) OCZ Trion 100 SSD (480 GB) OCZ Trion 150 SSD (960 GB) |
Intel SSD 530 (240 GB) OCZ Trion 100 SSD (480 GB) |
OS | Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit | Windows 10 Home 64 Bit |
Schenker Notebooks | Schenker W504 | Schenker XMG A505 | Schenker S413 |
---|---|---|---|
Mainboard | Intel HM87 | Intel HM87 | Intel HM87 |
Processor | Intel Core i7-4700MQ (Haswell) | Intel Core i7-4720HQ (Haswell) | Intel Core i7-4750HQ (Haswell) |
Graphics card | Nvidia GeForce GTX 980M (8 GB GDDR5) GTX 970M (6 GB GDDR5) GTX 880M (8 GB GDDR5) GTX 870M (6 GB GDDR5) GTX 860M Kepler (4 GB GDDR5) |
Nvidia GeForce GTX 960M (2 GB GDDR5) | Intel Iris Pro Graphics 5200 |
RAM | 2x 4 GB DDR3-1600 | 2x 4 GB DDR3-1600 | 2x 8 GB DDR3-1600 |
Storage | Samsung SSD 840 EVO (250 GB) | Micron M600 SSD (128 GB) HGST Travelstar 7K1000 HDD (1.000 GB) |
Intel SSD |
OS | Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit | Windows 10 Home 64 Bit | Windows 10 Home 64 Bit |
MSI Notebooks | MSI GE72 | MSI PE60 | MSI GP62 | MSI CX61 | MSI CX61 |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Mainboard | Intel HM170 | Intel HM170 | Intel HM86 | Intel HM86 | Intel HM86 |
Processor | Intel Core i7-6700HQ (Skylake) | Intel Core i7-6700HQ (Skylake) | Intel Core i7-5700HQ (Broadwell) | Intel Celeron 2970M (Haswell) | Intel Core i5-4200M (Haswell) |
Graphics card | Nvidia GeForce GTX 965M 2016 (2 GB GDDR5) | Nvidia GeForce GTX 950M (2 GB GDDR5) | Nvidia GeForce 940M (2 GB DDR3) | Nvidia GeForce 920M (2 GB DDR3) | Nvidia GeForce GT 720M (2 GB DDR3) |
RAM | 1x 8 GB DDR4-2133 | 2x 4 GB DDR4-2133 | 1x 8 GB DDR3-1600 | 1x 8 GB DDR3-1600 | 1x 8 GB DDR3-1600 |
Storage | Toshiba THNSNJ128G8NU SSD (128 GB) WDC WD10JPVX HDD (1.000 GB) OCZ Trion 100 SSD (480 GB) |
Toshiba MQ01ABF050 HDD (500 GB) | WDC Scorpio Blue HDD (1.000 GB) | ||
OS | Windows 10 Home 64 Bit | Windows 10 | Windows 10 | Windows 10 | Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit |
Asus Notebooks | Asus G752VS | Asus N551ZU |
---|---|---|
Mainboard | Intel CM236 | AMD K15.1 |
Processor | Intel Core i7-6820HK (Skylake) | AMD FX-7600P (Kaveri) |
Graphics cards | Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 (8 GB GDDR5) | AMD Radeon R9 M280X (4 GB GDDR5) |
RAM | 4x 16 GB DDR4-2400 | 2x 4 GB DDR3-1600 |
Storage | Toshiba NVMe THNSN5512GPU7 SSD (512 GB) | Samsung SSD 830 (256 GB) |
OS | Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit | Windows 10 64 Bit |
4K Monitor | Nvidia Driver | AMD Driver | Intel Driver |
---|---|---|---|
2x Asus PB287Q | ForceWare 375.70 | Crimson 16.10.3 | 15.40.28.4501 |