Introduction

We've always loved the Civilization franchise for its richly detailed approach to turn-based strategy and arguably best "God-games" (the "Tropico" series being a close second). Some of the older Civilization games had a simple enough production design to run on integrated graphics solutions, and while you could still run them on solutions such as AMD APUs and Intel HD Graphics with details watered down, its developers are rewarding gamers for investing in powerful graphics cards.

Civilization VI is the latest entry to the smash-hit franchise and builds on the "4X" (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate) victory-condition approach. Improvements have been made to the game's technology tree system. The game also introduces unit-stacking to help reduce on screen clutter.

Civilization VI uses a newer version of the Firaxis engine, with higher-resolution textures, higher terrain detail taking advantage of tessellation, and better visual effects, all of which comes at added GPU cost. The game still has a vast amount of under the hood customization for players to fine-tune it to their hardware. Despite promised, support for DirectX 12 isn't available yet in the game, but it appears to be something the developers are actively working on and will be released at a later time.

In this article, we took the game for a spin on contemporary graphics cards priced anywhere between $100 to $700, using the latest GeForce 373.06 (NVIDIA) and Crimson 16.10.2 (AMD) drivers across 1080p, 1440p, and 4K Ultra HD resolutions.