10 - Game performance: RB6 Vegas 2 | 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 monitor improper. 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 neighbors 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.

Rainbow Six Vegas 2

Rainbow Six Vegas 2 was released in march 2008, it promises to evolve the franchise with new gameplay features and a conclusion to the storyline that started in Rainbow Six Vegas.
On the whole, though, if you've played Rainbow Six Vegas, you'll feel right at home with Vegas 2, which plays very similarly to its predecessor. In it, you take on the role of Bishop, the team leader of a Rainbow Six squad, as you take on terrorists throughout Las Vegas in a story that parallels that of the original Rainbow Six Vegas. Players of that game will remember that a mole was discovered in the Rainbow Six operation: a soldier named Gabriel had betrayed his comrades. In Vegas 2, you re-encounter Gabriel and are forced to shut down his terrorist operation once and for all.

Is Vegas your playground...or battleground?

As it's included into the bundle, we took Vegas 2 for a test spin. Only with the cards setup in SLI though, just to get you an impression. Since we have two cards to render the game and so much shader power backing us up we enabled:

• All settings maxed out
• 8x AA
• Shadow Quality High
• Motion blur High

And yes, the results with these settings where pretty amazing. Though at 2560x1600 we see the limitation of a 512MB framebuffer kick in hard. but that was to be expected with 8xAA though.

These IQ settings are really, really extreme guys, nice !

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. This is a really tough nut to crack for mid-range graphics cards (with these settings) but as you can see, the results are just fine, and good to use.

Image Quality Settings:

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

Obviously with so much power under the hood, the game scales incredible. Small note, I just started using this benchmark, so the original GTX+ single card was not tested just yet. A card very close to that performance however is the 8800 GT OCX from BFG.

For this result I'll include a Radeon 4870 X2, after which in the other benchmarks we'll compare to Radeon 4850 Crossfire as that fits the pricing a little better. You can see that the 512Mb graphics cards have an awful harsh time at 2560x1600. This is due to the high AA settings where framebuffer size and bandwidth become a really important aspect of the framerate. But 1920x1200x32bit at 82 FPS at these setting  is pretty amazing for the Hydra kit.