007 First Light in the Tech Test: CPU Benchmarks
How does 007 First Light run on common processors? We tested it.
Table of Content
Finding a suitable CPU benchmark in 007 First Light was not easy. However, after many hours of play, we arrived at the black market, an environment that should look familiar to Hitman players. Masses of NPCs, some guards and many opportunities to disappear into the crowd. In other words, a perfect place to test processors. You can see the access to the scene and all details in the video. As always, readers who want to reproduce the benchmark are welcome to do so.
CPU Benchmarks
Please note that the game uses Denuvo copy protection. We are therefore significantly limited in the number of processors we can test within 24 hours. With 007 First Light, it is therefore important to us to compare the minimum requirement in the form of Intel's Skylake architecture, as well as recommended and widely used processors. As already seen with Hitman, the Glacier Engine shows insane scaling from DDR4 to DDR5, clearly visible in the large jump from the Ryzen 7 5800X3D to the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, which is rarely seen at a magnitude of more than 40 percent. But the jump from Zen 4 to Zen 5, with almost 30 percent more fps, is also a big one. This proves that the engine scales excellently with the resources of modern processors. That these, however, are not necessarily required for smooth gameplay is shown by the Coffee Lake figures: A Core i9-10900K is almost on the level of the Ryzen 7 5800X3D and is therefore fast enough for 007 First Light. As a minimum, we recommend a Ryzen 5 3600, which is in line with the developers' requirements.
Is 16 GiB RAM enough?
The developers recommend 16 GiB of RAM. We compared various processors with the regular memory amount in our test, 32 GiB, against 16 GiB and can actually give the all-clear here, because 007 First Light also runs smoothly with 16 GiB in our very CPU-heavy scene. The average memory usage during the tests was even below 10 GiB, which is quite unusual. Of course, this is also due to the fact that we only load the benchmark scene and do not continue playing otherwise. The usage will certainly rise, but if you have no problem with a few smaller stutters, 16 GiB RAM is also sufficient for the game.
007 First Light: Conclusion
IO Interactive has pulled it off: the studio has created what may well be the best James Bond game in years, possibly decades. Its blend of stealth, clever gadget use, environmental interaction and action sequences reminiscent of popular third-person adventures, combined with some spectacular set pieces, leaves a strong impression. At the same time, the game takes the time to establish this younger version of James Bond. 007 First Light also offers plenty of fan service, from MI6 headquarters and the weapons lab to familiar Bond names such as M and Moneypenny, as well as Jaguar and Aston Martin. After all, some of the franchise's iconic film stars are cars.
Despite some similarities and overlap, however, the open scenarios do not reach the varied complexity of the Hitman series. At the same time, 007 First Light feels somewhat more agile, and its new James Bond more youthful and light-footed than the cool, methodical assassin puzzles built around the bald contract killer. Compared with Hitman, 007 First Light is clearly the lighter experience, both in terms of gameplay and mechanics. And while you can sneak around many potential confrontations and avoid them altogether, there is rarely a compelling reason for the young James Bond not to draw his gun or let his fists do the talking. There are no bonuses for a careful approach, and in sections where stealth is not explicitly required, there are no penalties for going in loud. As a result, your approach has very little consequence. In this respect, too, 007 First Light is something of a lighter experience.
The impression that IO Interactive drew inspiration from the Uncharted series when designing the game becomes increasingly hard to ignore. Even the protagonist bears a striking resemblance to Uncharted adventurer Nathan Drake. The parkour and climbing sections, the visits to exotic locations and the third-person brawls and shootouts further underline these similarities. That, however, is not necessarily a bad thing. Quite the opposite: 007 First Light is an entertaining game that plays a little like a blend of Hitman and Uncharted, gives you a certain degree of freedom and mixes in several spectacular scripted sequences and fast-paced chases.
The visuals of the revised Glacier Engine are convincing as well. IO Interactive has extensively overhauled its in-house graphics engine and, with its software ray-tracing approach, offers an interesting and comparatively efficient way to give the game, and especially its lighting, a more modern look. On PC in particular, however, we would have liked to see a variant based on dedicated ray-tracing hardware, which could reduce screen-space artifacts and provide even greater accuracy. A patch adding what is currently the most advanced form of ray-traced rendering, path tracing, has already been announced and is likely to make even high-end PC hardware sweat, while also delivering significantly better lighting. But even away from ray tracing, Bond still has some catching up to do: the game urgently needs support for AMD FSR 4.1 and Intel XeSS, including their respective frame-generation technologies. At present, 007 First Light is heavily geared toward Nvidia hardware. Even so, First Light has turned out to be a successful and entertaining game that more than does justice to the source material.
