XSReviews

Long-running online tank battle game World of Tanks is gearing up towards its 1.0 release, where developers Wargaming are implementing a brand new graphics engine called Core. As part of the preparations, Wargaming have released a standalone demo app called enCore.

Like a benchmark app, it runs through a predetermined scene to test your computer’s performance at a given level of graphical fidelity. We’ve added the app to our list of games with built-in benchmarks, but as we haven’t seen much discussion of enCore we thought we’d cover it in a bit more detail here as well.

The app and its options

Once you start the app, you are greeted with a picturesque scene of tank parked in front of a European village featuring a large Abbey. The top centre is home to a large Test button which begins the benchmark, but let’s look at the other options first.

The bottom centre area allows you to switch between three presets, Minimum, Medium and Ultra, which correspond to presets in-game. You can also tweak settings individually and change resolution from the 1080p default by selecting the gear icon in the lower left corner.

The lower right corner takes you to the Encore site, which includes a useful FAQ. In the upper left, you can check your computer’s configuration, including its CPU, GPU, video memory, RAM and OS, just in case you forgot. Also in the upper left is a link to your previous test results, including the date, score, preset, resolution and anti-aliasing settings.

The benchmark scene

Now let’s begin with a run through the benchmark:

It’s a fairly interesting scene, with a nice mixture of beautiful scenery and relatively true-to-the-game tank on tank action. However, like all benchmarks it begins to loose its appeal after the third or fourth run-through!

The results

After finishing the benchmark, you’re given a score and a rating: 8,000 points or more is excellent (‘gold’), 3,000 points or more is good (‘silver’), and less than 3,000 is passable (‘bronze’). Wargaming also note that a rating of 10,000 or more should ensure that the game runs without annoying FPS drops.

Our XSR test rig comes equipped with a GTX 1080 and a liquid-cooled, overclocked Core i5 6600K (for full details, check out our specs page!). That was good for a a score of 28,188 on the Ultra preset at 1080p and 20,609 on the Ultra preset at 1440p.

That indicates that we should expect rather excellent performance, although Wargaming’s definition of excellence might not extend to our preference of maintaining 165 frames per second to make full use of our monitor. We’ll have to see how we do in the full game once it’s released!

Wrapping up

I hope you found this little look at the enCore app useful. Try it on your own PC, and let us know your score and PC specs in the comments below!