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Anno 117 PC Tech Review Finds Ray-Traced GI a Must-Have as Engine Shifts to GPU-Bound

Independent benchmarks show a GPU-bound engine delivering stable performance over extended play.

Overview

  • ComputerBase reports the PC release as a clear technical step up from Anno 1800, with notably improved visuals and overall execution.
  • Hardware ray tracing for global illumination is deemed essential to image quality and carries little performance cost compared with rasterization.
  • Ray-traced reflections impose a heavy performance hit and can disappear at long view distances instead of falling back to rasterized reflections.
  • DLSS 4 and FSR 4 deliver the best upscaled image quality in this title, while FSR 3.1 and XeSS 2 lag behind; FSR 4 is available via AMD’s driver app.
  • The game lacks native frame generation, but driver solutions such as Nvidia Smooth Motion and AMD Fluid Motion Frames work well; AMD and Nvidia GPUs perform comparably overall, with GeForce favoring rasterization and Radeon favoring ray tracing, and long-save testing indicates sustained GPU limits with only two crashes in about 25 hours.