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How Well Will Mass Effect 3 Run On Your PC?

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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.

Maximum Detail With 4x MSAA

Although we didn't have any luck enabling multi-sample anti-aliasing through Nvidia's drivers, we were able to get it operational using AMD's. Interested in how the feature impacts performance, we settled on 4x AA for our tests.

At 1280x1024, only the Radeon HD 6770 dips below 50 FPS. All of the other AMD cards manage to stay above 60 FPS.

Although clearly an issue with AMD's drivers, only the Radeon HD 6950 is able to support 4x MSAA at 1680x1050. Fortunately, it gives us playable performance at this setting, never dipping below 60 FPS.

Whatever issue plagued our other Radeon cards at 1680x1050 is fixed at 1920x1080.

We see that the Radeon HD 6770 delivers marginal performance at this resolution, generally ranging between 30 and 60 FPS. AMD's Radeon HD 6850 is much smoother, never dropping below 46 FPS. Meanwhile, the Radeon HD 6950 and Radeon HD 6850s in CrossFire spend most of their time way above 60 FPS.

110 Comments Comment from the forums
  • slicedtoad
    I'm hoping the full game has more customization. Either way, it'll be fun.
    Reply
  • shriganesh
    Why the hell article like these don't appear in the RSS feeds!!!
    Reply
  • 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
  • bartholomew
    Can't wait to get this game. :D
    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!

    Dont get me wrong though Im still excited to play it... just not expecting it to be graphically demanding.
    Reply
  • spp85
    Radeon HD 5770/6770 still Rockzzz.........
    Reply
  • spp85
    I 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
    Reply
  • Sud099
    why the hell they don't initially develop games for PC and then port to consoles like Battlefield 3
    Reply