LGP X2 The Threat v1.4

Although the space thriller X2 - The Threat may not carry the weight of such Linux titles as Quake 4 or Doom 3, it has been one of Linux Game Publishing's recent endeavors on bringing what was once a Windows game over to Linux. As we had noted in our initial X2 benchmarking preview, the Egosoft title is presently in BETA stages and is only open to a closed testing community. Hitting the private servers just hours ago has been the third BETA candidate for X2 - The Threat, and with this update comes a slated performance improvement. Just how well has Linux Game Publishing advanced with this game? We have just completed a round of testing and have some BETA 2 and BETA 3 results to report. Of course, it is important to keep in mind that the game is still very much under development and the figures being reported are likely to change by the time of retail availability, with the intentions of this article being to provide a rough estimate for the graphics demands. Comprising the graphics system for our testing today is a NVIDIA GeForce 7800GTX 256MB, with the complete systems specifications listed below.

For today's benchmarking, we ran X2 - The Threat BETA 2 and 3 at 800 x 600 - Minimum Quality, 1024 x 768 - Minimum Quality, 1280 x 960 - Minimum Quality, 1280 x 960 - Maximum Quality, 1280 x 960 - Maximum Quality - 8x AA/8x AF. The visual settings were controlled through the X2 in-game control panel, while the Antialiasing and Anisotropic Filtering levels in the last benchmark was overrode through the NVIDIA Settings Linux control panel.

As can be seen from the above graphs, there are evident performance improvements with the latest BETA 3 release. Of course, these numbers are likely to increase even more upon the official retail launch of X2 - The Threat. One of the issues still facing the Linux port, however, is an ATI driver related issue when running the benchmark, which is inhibiting us at the present time from reporting X2 performance numbers for the red. We will report additional X2 - The Threat Linux information as it arises.