Iron Harvest in the benchmark test – ComputerBase : Test |CUP | Specs |Config

tl;dr: With Iron Harvest, real-time strategy gets breathed into life: The gameplay is convincing, the technology largely does it in the test. For the most part, the game looks very nice and the system requirements are within reasonable limits. Only here and there are outliers.

Real-time strategy is not having an easy time of it at the moment, there are hardly any new games for this genre. With Iron Harvest, the German development team King Art wants to breathe new life into the segment and has chosen an interesting and unusual scenario for it. In terms of play, King Art is clearly based on the great role model Company of Heroes, but Iron Harvest does not play in the Second World War, but shortly after the First World War – after an alternative First World War. Instead of tanks, ‘Mechs cavort on the battlefield.

With Unity to one of the most beautiful strategy games

The Company of Heroes series was one of the most beautiful real-time strategy games of its time and Iron Harvest is in no way inferior. The Unity engine used conjures up a pretty graphic on the screen. There is always something going on on the monitor, especially the fights are very effective. That being said, the lighting and surfaces are also in good shape. Iron Harvest is undoubtedly at the forefront of the graphics league of strategy games.

The DirectX 11 renderer does not show any major weaknesses in the actual game. In the cutscenes you can see that King Art is not an AAA developer. In particular, the animations and the characters in general look a bit wooden, which is no longer noticeable in the top view when playing. This does not apply to the missions at night, which are much more dreary than the missions in daylight and visibly drop off visually. Most of the time, Iron Harvest looks good to very good.

Iron Harvest doesn’t offer a very extensive graphics menu, but is still well equipped for a strategy game. Example screenshots or descriptions are unfortunately missing, but there is an FPS limiter that can be configured to 30 FPS, 60 FPS or 120 FPS. In addition, the frame rate can be displayed: either permanently or, if desired, only in low FPS regions. In addition to graphic presets, the game offers numerous individual options. However, the game’s own downsampling or upsampling or a re-sharpening function are missing. All options can be changed without restarting the title.

Three presets with little effect

Iron Harvest offers three different graphic presets with “Low”, “Medium” and “High”. At the same time, high represents the maximum level of detail. The visual differences are minor. Those who switch from “high” to “medium” hardly have to accept any graphical losses. Some shadows are missing in the middle preset, which means that the vegetation in particular is visually flatter. That was it already. A large part of the surrounding obscuration is lost in low details, there are no more differences.

The optically minor influences of the graphic presets only bring a mediocre performance boost. If you switch back from the high to the medium preset, the frame rate on a GeForce RTX 2070 Super improves by 13 percent, on a Radeon RX 5700 XT by 17 percent. The low preset then brings a further 10 or 14 percent. Thus, the presets on an AMD graphics card bring a little more additional speed than with a counterpart from Nvidia – 33 to 24 percent is on this point.

Anti-aliasing three times with mediocre results

With FXAA, SMAA and TAA there are three different post-processing variants to choose from for anti-aliasing. FXAA and SMAA do not offer a temporal component, accordingly not all elements such as vegetation are considered. Although FXAA has an influence on the entire picture and improves the complete picture calm marginally, it also puts a heavy blurring over the picture. Meanwhile, SMAA captures the geometry better and there is hardly any blurring, the vegetation, on the other hand, continues to flicker clearly.

TAA offers a temporal component and thus clearly the best smoothing. However, this is far from perfect, because the image remains a little restless in low resolutions. In addition, there is a decent blurring in low resolutions such as Full HD, which becomes weaker with higher resolutions and eventually disappears. Despite its disadvantages, TAA is the recommended mode in the game.

Finally, it should be noted that the anti-aliasing in Iron Harvest is set independently of the presets. Even if you select the high preset, you still have to manually set the desired anti-aliasing.

On the next page: GPU and CPU benchmarks as well as frame times