Radeon HD 4870 review - ASUS

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.

I started playing this game a couple of days ago and just had to include it 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.

Mass Effect Settings:

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

I mean, the screenshot below is literally the quality you play at. Follow the green line, yes indeed .. it's going first base with the GeForce GTX 260.

Gaming: Call of Duty 4

Activision recently released Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the next installment in the popular war game series. Moving away from the World War II setting, Modern Warfare instead centers around a conflict involving Russia and the Middle East. And hey, you even get to die ... and then continue the game in the past.

Call of Duty 4. Is there anyone who doesn't like the game ? For this benchmark we use disguise ourselves in the Ghillie suit, load up ACT II - All Ghillied up. Not just for the great gameplay, but also the intense and dense graphics utilized are breathtaking. Massive high-quality texturing, shaders and a serious amount of shadows, fog and debris are applied in this level to mask and hide as best as you can.

Image Quality setting:

• 4x Anti Aliasing
• 16x anisotropic filtering
• All settings maxed out

Okay then, ATI yesterday released a new driver which mentioned a big improvement of COD4 performance. That improvement definitely was also present in our driver. That's 2560x1600 @ 40 FPS with all image quality settings enabled set to high for 299,- bucks people. Again that is quite a difference with the more expensive GeForce GTX 260. Honestly I didn't even expect to be comparing to that GTX 260 initially .. but it's just the reality man.