Introduction

The Anno series of games are richly designed civilization and economic simulators where you get to build and maintain cities and their economies in a particular period setting. After the smash-hit Anno 2070 from three years ago, Ubisoft is back with an even more futuristic sim set in the year 2205 in which mankind has colonized the moon beyond scientific expeditions, having established flourishing economies set way up there. In addition to that, you get to build inspirational cities down here on Earth.

What sets Anno 2205 apart from other contemporaries in this RTS genre (such as Tropico), is its developers' stunning attention to detail and visual presentation. That, of course, translates into a delicious graphics test and a potential industry standard benchmark for enthusiasts.

In this article, we take Anno 2205 for a spin on performance-thru-enthusiast graphics cards ranging from $100 and going all the way up to $1,000. In addition, we'll talk about the various graphics presets and how they impact visuals.

Settings

Anno 2205 offers plenty of settings, most of which you've already seen before in other games. I'm happy to report that there are no artificial FPS limits present in the game. Each individual option has plenty of settings, so even slower computers should run the game well, although at lower fidelity.

Interesting to note here is that multisample AA has made its comeback because Anno no longer uses a deferred rendering engine. The "Ultra" profile selects 8xAA, which comes with an unnecessary performance hit and doesn't look significantly better than 4xAA, which is why we picked 4xAA for all our testing. The other options stayed at their "Ultra" defaults.

Settings Comparison