It's 1988. The Russian Soviets, looking to stave of complete economic collapse, threaten the security of Europe. Armies everywhere are put on alert. Nuclear missiles are prepped and fueled and ready to fly. The United Nations refuses the claims of the Soviets, thinking that the military maneuvers are just one big bluff – but they're not. The first carrier group edges closer to the United States of America...and it looks like this time around, there will be no backing away from the finalities of total war.

That's the story behind the forthcoming PC title from Massive Entertainment: World In Conflict. As you can see from this in-game screenshot, war has hardly ever looked better.

World In Conflict is an RTS. But what set's it apart from most RTS game-DNA is that in this game, you won't be spending time building a base and managing resources. Instead, you have respawning units, and you gain ground by capturing command points, and get ahead by killing as many people as you can. You can choose to play one of four roles in the game (Armor, Air, Infantry, or Support) as you struggle to either kill the commies, or batter the capitalists, in this Cold War-era clash of the superpowers.    

World in Conflict had a strong showing at the recent E3 in Santa Monica. Many game journalists were impressed and the game received many positive reviews, including a nod from IGN as the "Best PC Strategy Game" and "Best Strategy Game All Platforms." A free open beta is currently underway for World In Conflict, and we suggest you give the game a spin. Judging by the polish of the current open beta, the game will should be in great shape by the time the September 17th release date comes around.

We've had the open beta of World In Conflict for about a week now, and have been putting it through its paces. This article will look at what kind of performance you can expect out of this game. The first half of the article will look at DirectX 9 version of the game versus the DirectX 10 rendered version of the game, to measure the performance difference, and quality difference, between the two. For the second half of this article, we will run a range of cards through the World In Conflict's in-game benchmarking program, to see what kind of performance you can expect from your GPU.

The good news is that even on the lower settings, this game looks fantastic.