How Well Will Mass Effect 3 Run On Your PC?
On March 6th, BioWare will launch Mass Effect 3, the final chapter in Shepherd's epic journey. We take the game's demo for a spin in anticipation of how this highly-anticipated title will behave on a broad range of graphics cards and processors.
Test System And Benchmarks
As usual, we're looking to represent performance across a wide range of graphics hardware, including models as slow as the Radeon HD 6450 and GeForce GT 430 to powerful Radeon HD 6950, GeForce GTX 560 Ti, GeForce GTX 460 SLI, and Radeon HD 6850 CrossFire configurations.
From what we've seen thus far, the single-player campaign is more taxing than the multi-player arenas, so we measured performance in the first 100 seconds of solo game play.
You'll notice that we're presenting minimum and average frame rates, in addition to FPS over time, which shows how often these cards spend under our target performance levels. In this author's personal opinion, there's little reason to explore frame rates in excess of 60 FPS.
| Test Hardware | |
|---|---|
| Processor | Intel Core i5-2500K (Sandy Bridge)Overclocked to 4 GHz, 6 MB L3 Cache, power-saving settings enabled, Turbo Boost disabled. |
| Motherboard | MSI P67A-GD65, Intel P67 Chipset |
| Memory | Corsair DDR3-1600, 2 x 4 GB, at 1600 MT/s, CL 8-8-8-21-2T |
| Hard Drive | Western Digital Caviar Black 750 GB, 7200 RPM, 32 MB Cache, SATA 3Gb/sSamsung 470 Series SSD 256 GB, SATA 3Gb/s |
| Graphics Cards | GeForce G 210 512 MB DDR2GeForce GT 440 1 GB DDR3GeForce GTX 550 Ti 1 GB GDDR5GeForce GTX 460 1 GB GDDR5GeForce GTX 560 Ti 1280 MB GDDR52 x GeForce GTX 460 1 GB GDDR5 in SLIRadeon HD 6450 512 MB GDDR5Radeon HD 6670 512 MB DDR3Radeon HD 6770 1 GB GDDR5Radeon HD 6850 1 GB GDDR5Radeon HD 6950 1 GB GDDR52 x Radeon HD 6850 1 GB GDDR5 in CrossFire |
| Power Supply | Seasonic X760 SS-760KM: ATX12V v2.3, EPS12V, 80 PLUS Gold |
| CPU Cooler | Cooler Master Hyper TX 2 |
| System Software And Drivers | |
| Operating System | Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate x64 |
| Renderer | OpenGL |
| Graphics Driver | GeForce: 295.73 |
| Row 11 - Cell 0 | Radeon: Catalyst 12.1 |
| Games | |
| Mass Effect 3 Demo | First 100 seconds of game play, Fraps |
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Prev Page Image Quality And Settings Next Page Minimum Detail (No Dynamic Shadows, No AA)Don Woligroski was a former senior hardware editor for Tom's Hardware. He has covered a wide range of PC hardware topics, including CPUs, GPUs, system building, and emerging technologies.
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bak0n I'd be really shocked if there are many people out there running Intel 2500k's with geforce 220's or radeon 6450's.Reply -
mildsend I have phenom x4 9550 with 9800gt can i run this game at moderat setting at 1366x768 resolutions ?Reply -
rmpumper I really hope that the highest setting in ME3 demo are like med-high in the full game.Reply -
shin0bi272 So wait this console based game thats running on the unreal 3 engine plays well on a pc with a quad core and even a moderately good graphics card? Im shocked!Reply
Dont get me wrong though Im still excited to play it... just not expecting it to be graphically demanding. -
spp85 ReplyI have phenom x4 9550 with 9800gt can i run this game at moderat setting at 1366x768 resolutions ?
You can play medium to high settings on that resolution -
Sud099 why the hell they don't initially develop games for PC and then port to consoles like Battlefield 3Reply