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.

I recently started playing this game and you know what, it's rare for me but I spent the weekend on it and finished the game. I just had to include this new title 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

Again I really like this game, the screenshot below is literally the quality you play at. Now immediately we see something weird. You'd expect a 2GB card to be faster right? Wrong, the memory on this card is clocked slower than the reference samples. Some games are just framebuffer clock frequency dependant, and Mass Effect is one of them, resulting in a 7 to 10% performance differential.

Gaming: Race Driver - GRID

Codemasters has released Race Driver: GRID, offering many Race events to compete in. Description is: "Charge a Ford Mustang GTR muscle car through the iconic streets of San Francisco, race a BMW 320Si in the Jarama Touring Car Race and drift around the docks of Yokohama in a Nissan Silvia S15. Race against 11 friends on your favorite track and test your metal online or prove yourself in the single player game." GRID is a stunning game with a great racing feel, but most of all excellent graphics.

Based on the Ultra image quality settings you are looking at resolutions from 10x7 up to the 4M+ pixels counting  2560x1600. To spice image quality up, we enabled 4xMSAA as well. .

Obviously there are also situations where the game is framebuffer size limited, and that's where the card kicks back in. At 2560x1600 it's actually as fast as the GeForce GTX 200 series.

This literally is the game rendering quality you are playing in.