Controversial, new and definitely one of the bigger titles of the year. Mass Effect from BioWare. Originally released for the XBOX 360 it unveiled a vast, beautiful galaxy populated by diverse, fascinating alien races. Players stepped onto this stage as Commander Shepard, a hero at the vanguard of humanity's ascension in the arena of galactic politics, and thus began an epic story bolstered by engaging characters and rich, branching dialogue.

Set 200 years in the future in an epic universe, Mass Effect places gamers in a vast galactic community in danger of being conquered by a legendary agent gone rogue. A spectacular new vision from legendary developers BioWare, Mass Effect challenges players to lead a squad of freedom fighters as they struggle against threatening armies to restore peace in the land.

Liked it, liked it a lot and played it completely. Mass Effect I just had to include in our benchmark suite. We had to overcome some problems though, a nasty framerate cap was removed and the game actually does not support AA. It does however show really awesome graphics, complex facial animations and applies a noise filter just to get you that really nice cinematic feeling. Overall one of the better games I've played this year so far. Definitely pick it up.

We covered all the bases and cards in previous reviews, plus you can compare numbers in our VGA charts so for this review I wanted to keep things simple and straight forward so we can nicely show the performance scaling.

Mass Effect Settings:

• Noise Filter on
• Textures: Extreme high
• Filter: Anisotropic
• Everything maxed out

Unfortunately with our image quality settings, the card is not fast enough. You'll have to forfeit to a lower quality level. Remember, this is an entry level product.

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Don't mistake the PC version for being a port of the Xbox 360 game. The PC version has larger and different levels than those featured on the Xbox 360, as well as a different graphics engine and style of gameplay.

The game itself looks great and the intricate physics modeling seen in the single-player version is still active in the multiplayer version.

There are all sorts of other interactions you'll encounter in multiplayer.
For instance, aluminum cans litter the street and stepping on them not only kicks them around, but also creates a loud sound that may betray your presence to the enemy.

And here are the results done with the newer GRAW2. Here I still had the GeForce 8600 GT results available for. Check out the difference in performance. Pretty good actually.

Image Quality settings:

• Edge Smoothing Anti Aliasing
• 16x anisotropic filtering
• Dynamic shadows HIGH