Brothers in Arms - Hells Highway VGA performance review - 5

Time to show you some performance results. We start at the top of our test resolution, 2560x1600 which is GPU limited and then move onwards up-to 1280x1024 which is more CPU limited.

So the first thing that you'll notice is that the Radeon 4870 X2 is not yet optimized at driver level to fully work with multiple GPUs. Would it have done so, it would be on top for sure. This is the problem with driver dependency and multi-GPU products. NVIDIA does have it under control as the GeForce 9800 GX2 takes a pretty significant lead here.

If you like to play the game at this uber-resolution ... you need to have either a Radeon HD 4870 or GeForce GTX 260 to start with.

At 1920x1200 we are still at a very GPU bound resolution, yet a lot of you guys already have a 21-24" monitor supporting this resolution. Your starting graphics card at minimum should be a GeForce 8800 GT or Radeon HD 3870 which are very affordable cards.

At 1600x1200 the GPU starts to matter less and less, and the CPU is becoming increasingly important. The upside for this is that lower cost graphics cards often can handle this resolution pretty well. And that shows as at 1600x1200 a cheapo Radeon HD 3850 would be sufficient as well as a GeForce 9600 GT.

At the lowest measured resolution we notice that the only card struggling is a GeForce 8600 GTS with 256MB frame-buffer. For this card you'll need to lower image quality settings, or much better ... get a new graphics card. The rest of the bunch, even the sub 90 USD Radeon HD 4670 will render the game perfectly fine.

Final words

We feel that Brothers in Arms - Hells Highway is a pretty awesome title to have on your wishlist. Though not perfect, you'll enjoy the gameplay and pretty nice graphics for sure. Thanks to the Unreal III engine one thing is a save bet, pretty much any somewhat modern PC will allow you to play the game, even with high image quality settings enabled.

It's very plausible that Guru3D.com will add this title in it's software suite for future graphics card reviews. Thanks to Ubisoft for shipping out the game to us. We'll be working more closely together with them in the future to bring you more little articles like shown today.

Laters you guys.

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