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 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 benefit from it greatly, whereas NVIDIA's cards are stuck at DX10.0. This gives NVIDIA cards a performance disadvantage.

GeForce GTX 275 wise you'll however still have plenty of raw performance to play the game even with the best image quality settings. The recommended maximum resolution here is something close to 1920x1080.