The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena
Hardware and System Requirements
Assault on Dark Athena is quite stable and it runs well on upper midrange systems with all in-game settings fully maxed out at 1920×1200 resolution. Generally, the frame rate as measured by FRAPS, hovered above the “magic 30” frames per second that is needed for a fluid first person shooter experience. The review PC played the game with a single Radeon HD4870-1GB originally with Catalyst 9-3 but had many issues including crashing to desktop and loss of saved games. Simply installing the Catalyst 9.4, which was released the very next day by ATi, fixed all of the issues.
Unfortunately, I did not finish EfBB for the second time as I lost two hours of gameplay from corrupt saves before I installed Catalyst 9.4 drivers. Fortunately, I remembered EfBB and it has not changed except for the updated graphics. There were no issues further with playing and completing Dark Athena after updating to the latest ATi drivers.
The minimum hardware required to play Assault on Dark Athena as listed on the box is a AMD 3800+ or Intel Pentium D 805 and a ATi Radeon HD2600 or a Nvidia GeForce 6800 ultra. Recommended HW would include an Intel Core 2 Duo of at least 1.8 Ghz or Athlon X2 +5200 coupled with a ATi Radeon HD3800 or Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT. 11 GB of free disk space is required to install on XP’s DX9c pathway or Vista DX10 operating systems. An Internet connection is required for one-time activation but you need DSL or cable for the free multiplayer – or a LAN to play multiplayer among friends.
Plenty of choice with MSAA
Even Ambient Occlusion!
Digital Rights Management [DRM]
Although nothing is stated on the box or in the game manual, there are anti-piracy measures implemented in the game beyond Internet activation. BluesNews.com contacted the The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena publisher Atari for clarification and got this answer:
“The protection on the PC version of The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena is an activation system with online authentication required the first time you install the game on a machine. The activation code lets you install the game on up to 3 machines, with an unlimited number of installs on each assuming that you don’t change any major hardware in your PC or re-install your operating system.
If you reach the maximum number of installations you can contact the Atari hotline and if it’s a legitimate request you can get a new activation code.
Test Configuration
Test Configuration – Hardware:
*Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550S (engineering sample reference 2.83 GHz)
*ASUS Rampage Formula (Intel X48 chipset, latest BIOS. PCIe 2.0 specification)
*4 GB DDR2-PC8500 RAM (2×2 GB, dual-channel at PC6400 speeds)
*ATi Radeon 4870 (1GB, reference clocks by ASUS)
*Onboard SupremeFX-II (ASUS Rampage motherboard daughter-card)
*250 GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 hard drive
Test Configuration – Software and Settings:
* ATi Catalyst 9-3 and Catalyst 9-4, highest quality mip-mapping set in the driver; Catalyst AI set to “Standard”
* Windows Vista 32-bit SP1; very latest updates with Assault on Dark Athena run under DX10 render paths
* DirectX November 2008.
* Assault on Dark Athena is reviewed as purchased out of the retail box.
* vsync is off
* 4xAA enabled and all in-game settings at “maximum” unless ambient occlusion is enabled
* Highest quality sound (stereo) used in all games.
