Shadow Warrior 2 Releases Today With Two Cutting-edge Graphical Features

It’s interesting that in the same week in which Duke Nukem 3D: 20th Anniversary gets released, a new Shadow Warrior title shows up as well. Why is that interesting? It’s because one year after Duke 3D came out (1997), its engine was used to build what’s in effect an “Asian Duke Nukem”, with the same kind of humor, violence, and level design. It wasn’t just a copy-cat game, either; it stood on its own, and has become somewhat of a cult classic.

When the series’ remake came out in 2013, I had worried that it wasn’t going to live up to the original – but it did. The game was downright gorgeous, and had the same kind of humor that the original did, and not to mention the gratuitous violence. Well, you could say that I have high hopes for Shadow Warrior 2, and by the looks of things, that could live up, as the game is currently getting many 4/5s and 90%s from the leading gaming press.

While we can’t talk about gameplay or anything of the sort yet, what we do know about SW2 is that it packs in two useful features; one being an NVIDIA-exclusive. The simplest of the two is HDR support, but it’s an important addition, as this is the first PC game to do so. To take advantage of it, you’ll need an HDR display. Unfortunately, we don’t have one in the lab, but from looking at content on many HDR displays at trade shows, I can honestly say that it’s a technology I’d love to own sooner than later. NVIDIA must see things similarly, as it worked directly with Shadow Warrior 2 dev Flying Wild Hog with its HDR support, even providing an HDR display so that the company could actually witness the fruits of its labor.

The other big feature ties into NVIDIA’s SMP technology, or simultaneous multi-projection. We talked about this way back at Pascal’s launch; it’s in effect a way to fine-tune how content is displayed on either a single or multiple monitors. On multiple monitors, it could help with the perspective of the game; on single ones, it could help improve performance, thanks to MRS, or multi-res shading.

What MRS does is decrease the quality of the edges of a game ever-so-slightly so as to improve performance. The idea is that more often than not, you’re going to be looking head-on in a game, especially one that’s as action-packed as Shadow Warrior 2. NVIDIA shows that at 4K and 1440p, enabling MRS could improve performance by between 7 – 14 FPS. You’ll have two options to choose from: conservative, or aggressive; the latter of which is the biggest FPS booster.

I highly recommend you check out the GeForce.com article on this feature, because examples are provided through the use of sliders, so it’s easy to see the differences. I’ll include two images here, though: the top one has MRS turned off, whereas the bottom has it set to aggressive:

If you download each full image and flick between them in an image editor, you can easily spot the differences in the foliage on either side of the screen, and even some differences in the shading. The result isn’t “bad”, though; on its own, the aggressive profile still looks great, so many might consider that to be worth the performance boost of 10~15% (projected; we’ve yet to test it ourselves).

If you’re interested in learning more about Shadow Warrior 2, you can hit up its Steam page. Currently, the game retails for $39.99, although there’s a 10% discount available right now to celebrate the game’s launch.