Conclusion

Ubisoft's Anno 2205 is a worthy successor to the new series. The core mechanics are the same, but you now get to play in several locations at once and have to manage resource transfers to accommodate the needs of your citizens. While the game feels a bit easier for some, it definitely comes with top-notch graphics that make even the most powerful graphics cards sweat.

In our testing, we see significantly better performance from NVIDIA cards than from their AMD counterparts, especially on the Maxwell architecture. NVIDIA released an updated driver for Anno 2205 today—we'll see how long it takes AMD to address these performance issues. AMD is hard at work on their new Crimson Edition driver, and I just hope the driver does not only bring UI improvements but also includes a performance uplift for the latest games coming out this season.

In terms of memory usage there isn't much of interesting to report; the game uses slightly more than 2 GB VRAM in most cases, and only 4K resolution sees memory usage go up to 3 GB, which is perfectly fine for today's spectrum of graphics cards. This also means that there is no reason to buy a more expensive R9 390X with 8 GB VRAM when you can essentially have the same performance clock-for-clock with a cheaper R9 290X 4 GB.

I'd like to mention one more thing: the current version of Anno 2205 suffers from a system RAM memory leak—you will see Anno use up all of your available RAM if you play for several hours on end without restarting the game, which can also cause GPU slowdowns shortly before the system runs out of memory, so make sure to restart the game from time to time.