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.

Mass Effect is one of the best games I have played this year. I just had to include in our benchmark suite.

As you can see, here we can observe a ~15% increase in framerate in the resolutions up-to 1920x1200 due to the two additional CPU cores, but that's it really.

Mass Effect Settings:

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

Now there is one titles that likes quad-core processors very much. Let's have a look at it.

Devil may Cry 4 - DirectX 10

Typically we're not quickly impressed with games these days from a graphical point of view. The game Devil May Cry however opens up a can of graphics that is just really impressive. We play the game in DX10 mode with every image quality setting available set to it's highest possible variable. The game itself -- Stylish action, terrific boss fights, and beautiful, melodramatic cut scenes will inspire you to push forward, and they serve as an appropriate reward for a well-played sequence of demon slaying.

On consoles, Devil May Cry 4 might be beautiful; on the PC in DirectX 10 mode, it completely overwhelms, what a fantastic looking title. Let's check out the performance.

Since we'll be using this test for a long time-frame we decided to measure at DirectX 10 with 8 multi-sample Antialising levels enabled and all setting set to high.

Image Quality Settings:

• 8x Multi Sample Anti Aliasing
• Textures: Super High
• Shadows: Super High
• Quality: Super High

There you go, Devil may Cry 4 is multi-threaded and loves more CPU cores. Now I had not yet tested the game with two separate 4870 cards on out own test-system, yet we did test the 4870 X2 on it. It's a pretty close match anyway, but you can see that the Smooth Creations system with two independent 4870 cards is faster than one X2; very likely due to the quad core nature.

Amazing performance really, but 10-15% more performance is realistic when looking at quad versus dual-core right now in the most modern games.