VGA performance: HAWX (DX10)

Tom Clancy's HAWX

We don't see many air combat games on the market these days and I sincerely don't know how many of you are still into classic flight sims. The famed Ace Combat series was nice. I did play the latest installment, Ace Combat 6, and I must say it has all the essentials of a decent arcadish-flavored flight game.

With HAWX we enter a new level. There are well over 50 planes in the game, each of which carries a destructive payload. You'll need it, as you'll engage multiple hostiles across war-torn but still gorgeous looking terrain. However, you won't be alone, and you'll have the option of issuing orders to your squad mates, just like we are used to in the Ghost Recon series.

Visually, the game's impressive, especially when flying in close to cities, which really shows off the building details. But it's when the game pulls into the third-person perspective while you dog-fight that the game flaunts its visuals and you really see much of the environment. The genre of air combat games could finally see a decent revival with Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X., and we like that... very much actually.

Tom Clancy's HAWX amazes me when it comes to originality, but more importantly... graphics wise it's quite a lovely game. For this game we selected the following image quality (IQ) settings.

• 4x AA
• 16x AF
• ALL settings @ HIGH
• All candy like HDR, DOF etc ON
• DirectX 10/10.1 mode + Ambient occlusion, sun shafts and shadows at HIGH

Now, we altered our image quality settings recently, and bumped up the AA level to 4x AA, also for ATI graphics cards we will enable DX10.1 mode.

As a result, at this moment, I have tested only a handful of cards which we can compare with. Apologies for this. It certainly does not place the 4770 in the right perspective as it is positioned against high-end cards. But you'll agree with me that it can actually hold up really well.

When we spread out performance versus monitor resolutions, with the Radeon HD 4770 you could play HAWX really well up to 1920x1080 with 4x AA thanks to the DX10.1 mode, that is really impressive. After a monitor resolution  of roughly 1920x1080 you'll get severely memory limited and the framerate caves in.