Home   >   Game Reviews   >   Major League Baseball 2K11 PC Performance Analysis

Major League Baseball 2K11 PC Performance Analysis

By on March 19, 2011

2K Sports has just released the latest part of their baseball series for the PC, so it’s time to see if it is a good port and how it performs in modern PC’s. For this performance analysis, we used a Q9650 @ 4.2Ghz with 4GB DDR2, a GTX295 and Windows 7 64Bit with Nvidia’s ForceWare 267.31 drivers.

Major League Baseball 2K11 starts nicely, with a welcome screen prompting us to press enter to continue. However, the in-game button indications are not properly fixed for the keyboard. To fully enjoy this game, you’ll need a gamepad and preferably Microsoft’s X360 controller. It’s sad that there aren’t proper keyboard button indications, since this game doesn’t take full advantage of the analog sticks like Fifa11 or NBA 2K11 do.

There are a few graphical options that can be tweaked. Naturally, you can choose your resolution and its brightness value. You can also choose your MSAA amount and quality, the Crowd detail, the Sideline Characters detail, Shader/Texture/Shadow Quality and you can enable if you want the particles effects and the DoF effect. In addition, the game offers native support for Anisotropic Filtering and there is a benchmark tool to see how well the game peforms to your computer.

Nvidia doesn’t have any SLI profile for the game, so we tried to force it via our control panel. We chose AFR2 and both of our cores were working, but not ideally. Each of our cores were working at around 50% GPU usage. This of course is because we didn’t use a proper SLI profile for the game. Therefore, you’ll have to wait for a new ForceWare driver that will have one. Thankfully, the game is not demanding at all and you will be able to play it even in Single GPU mode or in AFR2 mode.

At 1920×1080 with all the details maxed out and 4xMSAA, we were averaging around 100fps. Our minimum framerate was 70, so rest assured that the game will run great even if you have an old GPU. Graphically there is not much to write home about. Characters are highly detailed but the baseball terrains seem average at best. The grass textures are mediocre and we were hoping for some clever shading effects for the grass, like the ones of Fifa11. The crowd is amazing and reacts to your balls but still, there is nothing breathtaking. Major League Baseball 2K11 takes also advantage of quadcores. All of our cores were used, but were not stressed. This is after all a baseball game but still, 2K Sports’ engine scales great. When we simulated a dualcore system, performance remained the same. So yes, you’ll be able to run it even if you’re stuck with a dualcore system.

All in all, 2K Sports did a great game. Our only complain is about the lack of button indicators for the keyboard and hope that 2K Sports will address this issue with a patch. Apart from that, the game looks good and fans of this series will be pleased with its performance. Enjoy the following screenshots!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

About David Scarpitta

I am a critical guy, and love to review and give my professional opinion on just about anything. Though have a love for tech/gaming and music alongside the cinema. You can catch me consulting and developing the net any day of the week.