VGA performance: Tom Clancy HAWX 2 (DX10)

Tom Clancy's HAWX

We don't see many air combat games on the market these days and I sincerely don't know how many of you are still into classic flight sims. The famed Ace Combat series was nice. I did play the latest installment, Ace Combat 6, and I must say it has all the essentials of a decent arcadish-flavored flight game.

With HAWX we enter a new level. There are well over 50 planes in the game, each of which carries a destructive payload. You'll need it, as you'll engage multiple hostiles across a war-torn but still gorgeous looking terrain. However, you won't be alone, and you'll have the option of issuing orders to your squad mates, just like we are used to in the Ghost Recon series.

Visually, the game's impressive, especially when flying in close to cities, which really shows off the building details. But it's when the game pulls into the third-person perspective while you dog-fight that the game flaunts its visuals and you really see much of the environment. The genre of air combat games could finally see decent revival with Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X., and we like that... very much actually.

Tom Clancy's HAWX amazes me when it comes to originality, but more importantly... graphics wise it's quite a lovely game. For this game we selected the following image quality (IQ) settings.

We altered our image quality settings compared to recent reviews, we have bumped up the AA level to 4x AA, also for ATI graphics cards we will now enable DX10.1 mode.

• 4x AA
• 16x AF
• ALL settings @ HIGH
• All candy like HDR, DOF etc ON
• DirectX 10/10.1 mode + Ambient occlusion, sun shafts and shadows at HIGH

Now ATI cards can utilize the DX 10.1 codepath and definitely benefit from it greatly, whereas NVIDIA's cards are stuck at DX10.0. This gives NVIDIA cards a performance disadvantage.

And thanks to that DX10.1 codepath, the Radeon HD 4890 takes the lead here. It's good to see ATI finally reaping some benefits out of this feature.

GTX 275 wise you'll however still have plenty of raw performance. Take 1920x1080 for example. The difference is merely 10%, but at 50 rendered frames per second, really you can't complain.

The million dollar question: addressing the 'what if?' thesis.

So for those that will now shout, 'hey NVIDIA doesn't have DX 10.1, how is that fair to compare this way?' Well apples for apples image quality remains the same. ATI simply benefits from a speed increase over the DX10.1 code-path, it is quite amazing to see how much of a difference it makes, good for them, and if you have a Radeon 3000 / 4000 series graphics card, definitely flag this function on.

But before you start requesting, what if ATI would not be DX 10.1 compatible? Above you can find both cards with DX 10.0 enabled, and thus for ATI 10.1 disabled. Yes, the GeForce GTX 275 would have taken the lead.