8 - Game performance: Mass Effect | Devil may Cry 4

Setup your monitor

Make sure before playing games only is setting up your monitors contrast & brightness levels a very important thing to do. I realized recently that a lot of you guys have setup your monitors improperly. How do we know this? Because we receive a couple of email every now and then telling that a reader can't distinguish the benchmark charts (colors) in our reviews. We realized, if that happens, your monitor is not properly setup.

This simple test pattern is evenly spaced from 0 to 255 brightness levels, with no profile embedded. If your monitor is correctly set up, you should be able to distinguish each step, and each step should be roughly visually distinct from its neighbours by the same amount. As well, the dark-end step differences should be about the same as the light-end step differences. Finally, the first step should be completely black.

Gaming: Mass Effect

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.

Results: for today we'll take the run of the mill Radeon series 4000 graphics cards. In deep green you'll spot NVIDIA and in red the HIS 4830 product.

Cards used:

• Radeon HD 4850 512MB
• Radeon HD 4830 512MB
• Radeon HD 4670 512MB
• GeForce 9800 GT512MB

Should you have a need to compare the performance results to other competing cards, please check out our VGA charts.

Mass Effect Settings:

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

Mass Effect is one of the best games I have played this year. I just had to include in our benchmark suite. The game shows 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 titles I've played this year so far.

What you'll continuously notice is how close the 4830 is to the 4850. ATI really is it's own biggest competitor. At the similar NVIDIA priced 9800 GT level we well see a lot of similar performance as well, with the occasional exceptions here and there of course.

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 Anti-aliasing levels enabled and all in-game remaining setting are set to high. Typically this is a really tough nut to crack for mid-range graphics cards, the ATI cards just love this title and NVIDAI's cards have a really rough time at 8xAA opposed to ATI.

Image Quality Settings:

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

The new Catalyst 8.9 drivers show a massive increase in performance throughout all Radeon series 4000 cards. Even a 4830 at 2560x1600 produced an astonishing 34 FPS framerate .. on average.

Absolutely stunning performance and look at the NVIDIA 9800 GT card going on it's ass there. This is one of these titles that suit ATI cards really well. Obviously the ball will turn around just as well for NVIDIA with other titles. But more on that later.