Civilization: Beyond Earth, the latest instalment of Firaxis' popular Civilization franchise, was released in late October. We tested the game using 21 contemporary GPUs to determine whether it is AMD or Nvidia boards that offer the best performance for this game.

Beyond Earth is a turn-based strategy game, just like the other Civilization games. The game is set in the future. Chaos has turned the Earth into an inhospitable place, and eight factions have begun the search for a home beyond Earth. After deciding with which faction you would like to play, you will begin colonizing a planet still uninhabited by humans, taking on alien creatures and rival factions in the process.

This game, which has been developed by Firaxis, runs on the Civilization game engine. Said engine does not only run on DirectX 11, but on AMD's special Mantle API as well. Given that Civilization contains a fair amount of AI components, the Mantle version should offer substantially improved performance for systems with a slower CPU. We'll of course be analysing this later in this article.