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 a couple of weeks ago. It's rare for me but I spent an entire 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 framerate limitation 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.

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. You'll notice that the R700 card kicks in really hard. In fact what you'll see throughout the benchmarks is that it's close to or as fast as two 4870 cards setup in Crossfire. Which is pretty much what we expected as the core frequency of the X2 is slightly lower than the reference clocked 4870 cards.

In short, this game at the very best image quality settings at 2560x1600 at 90+ FPS ... that's just awesome.