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• Mass Effect

  Mass Effect Ported from Xbox 360, Mass Effect runs very well on the Radeon HD 3870 X2, except that the card is incapable of applying the antialiasing demanded by the drivers. But that proved to be useful at 1920*1200 (but not at 2560*1600, since the game became simply unplayable at that resolution). Another advantage is that it didn’t keep the GTX 280 from leading the field, since the 9800 GX2 doesn’t do well with this game and for once was soundly beaten (34% at 1920*1200 + filters and 62% at 2560 *1600). The GTX 280’s lead on the 9800 GTX was 220% at 1920*1200 + filters, and here the GeForce GTX 260 easily came in just behind its big sister.

• The Test

  For this test, we used our reference configuration, and as usual tested the games exclusively with Fraps and under real gaming conditions. Most of the games used previously were used again, and updated as always (with the latest patches installed), but two new items have been included: Mass Effect, the space opera RPG by Bioware, which despite its Xbox 360 origins has been successfully ported and which we felt we simply had to use (also since it fills the gap left in our protocol since we dropped Fable). There’s also Race Driver: GRID, which despite its interface, is still a tester’s nightmare (like the earlier Colin McRae Dirt from the same publisher, Codemasters). The title is also visually very attractive and inaugurates the latest version of the Ego Engine. All the synthetic DirectX 9 tests were run under Windows XP because of their instability under Vista (Fillrate Tester, RightMark 1050, ShaderMark 2.1 and SPECviewperf 10). RightMark 3D 2.0 (DirectX 10) was of course run under Windows Vista (without SP1 due to its instability with it), and Vista SP1 was used for all the games, CUDA tests, environmental measurements and overclocking. UAC, Aero, SuperFetch and indexing were disabled to ensure stable results. We used only two resolutions for this test, 1920*1200 (24/26"), and of course the 2560*1600 used by 30" monitors – in this case a Samsung 305T. That’s because we feel that they’re the only two resolutions this type of very-high-end card will be running. Below them (up to 22"), you wouldn’t need to cough up the price of this breed of 3D card to get a good, fluid display on the majority of current games, as we noted during our latest tests Plateforme.jpg Test configuration: Asus P5E3 Deluxe (Intel X38) Intel Core 2 Quad QX6850 (3 GHz) Crucial 2 x 1 GB DDR3 1333 MHz 7-7-7-20 Western Digital WD5000AAKS Asus 12x DVD player Cooler Master RealPower Pro 850W Windows XP, Vista, Vista SP1 ForceWare 177.34 beta (GTX 260 and GTX 280 under Vista) ForceWare 177.26 beta (GTX 280 under XP) ForceWare 175.16 WHQL (9800 GTX, 9800 GX2, 8800 Ultra) Catalyst 8.5 WHQL (HD 3870 X2)

• Photo-Realistic Backgrounds

  One of the greatest weaknesses in modern titles are often menus and displays showing information like life or stamina. The possibility of including photo-realistic displays are there, but these are not used. One example of this is Oblivion. The game world is intended to look real, but if you switch to the inventory, the magic menu or to the map, you are punished with a raw mass of pixels. This has even gone so far that the players themselves have put together a high resolution map modification. The reason for this often lies in the origin of the game. For example, Oblivion was produced for the Xbox, and thus the developers assumed a TV screen would be used. As TV screens very often have a low resolution, and the writing needs to remain readable, the menus were designed for use with a lower number of pixels. As a result, PC gamers with high-res LCD displays are subjected to the full horror of colorless areas flickering. This problem is less understandable when it comes to games developed for the PC, though. Why have the graphics designers of Stalker: Clear Sky gone to all the trouble to draw the PDA specially, when a photo-realistic background looks more professional? Game producers should take a page from the Hollywood production book; they are much better when it comes to futuristic displays and consoles.