8 - Game Performance: Gaming: Mass Effect | Call of Duty 4
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 likely two weeks ago. It's rare for me but I spent the weekend on it and finished the game. I just had to include this new title 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.
We covered all the bases and cards in previous reviews, plus you can compare numbers in our VGA charts so for this review I wanted to keep things simple and straight forward so we can nicely show the performance scaling. So I used the two Force3D cards and a GeForce 9800 GTX+, all within the 200-300 USD price range.
Mass Effect Settings:
- Noise Filter on
- Textures: Extreme high
- Filter: Anisotropic
- Everything maxed out
Again I really like this game, the screenshot below is literally the quality you play at.
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
ATI's new Catalyst drivers haul ass with COD4. A massive improvement was made. Combine that with the two newly released cards and you just found the golden nugget. The 4850 offers great performance, the 4870 is showing dreamy performance. Awesome.
The level where we measure and the image quality settings used
