Dragon Age: Inquisition VGA graphics performance review

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VGA Image Quality Settings and Test System

Image Quality Settings and Test System

Before we begin with the graphics performance tests a little explanation. We use a time based measurement based upon framerate recording. The test is a representative for any modern age GPU. Our rather settings are:

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You will notice we keep HBAO at Full and apply 2x MSAA anti aliasing, we perform our tests with ultra quality, heck you are a PC gamer. However, some older mid-range card can struggle at these settings. So if that happens to you simply disable MSAA and you should be fairly fine, but we'll show you that over the next few pages. 

The graphics cards used in this specific article are:

  • GeForce GTX 750 Ti 
  • GeForce GTX 660
  • GeForce GTX 680
  • GeForce GTX 760
  • GeForce GTX 770
  • GeForce GTX 780
  • GeForce GTX 780 Ti
  • GeForce GTX 970
  • GeForce GTX 980
  • GeForce GTX 980 SLI x2
  • GeForce GTX Titan
  • Radeon HD 7850
  • Radeon HD 7870
  • Radeon HD 7950
  • Radeon HD 7950 Boost
  • Radeon HD 7970
  • Radeon HD 7970 GHz
  • Radeon R7 265
  • Radeon R9 270
  • Radeon R9 270X
  • Radeon R9 280X
  • Radeon R9 285
  • Radeon R9 290
  • Radeon R9 290X
  • Radeon R9 295x2
So that is a selection of 25+ graphics cards. Our test will be the internal benchmark and not a level recording. This way you can mimic the test at home and compare a little. The benchmark can be quick or slow depending on your graphics card, resolution and image quality settings. Typically for a benchmark run there will be a scene rendered where the output of the number of frames rendered over time equals to an average framerate. This internal benchmark however works vice versa, the benchmark will render a number of frames as fast as it can to achieve its score. it's not sexy to look at with a very fast graphics card, but it works well. But on a GTX 980 Dual SLI system, the benchmark run can take seconds where on a GeForce GTX 660 it can run up-to a full minute of rendering.
 

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Our test system is based on a powerful eight-core Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition with Haswell-E based setup on the X99 chipset platform. This setup is overclocked to 4.40 GHz on all cores. Next to that we have energy saving functions disabled for this motherboard and processor (to ensure consistent benchmark results). We use Windows 8.1 all patched up. Each card runs on the same PC with the same operating system clone.

  • GeForce cards use the latest 344.75 driver.
  • AMD Radeon graphics cards we used the latest 14.12.x Beta driver. 
Let's head on-wards to the next page where we'll look at some screenshots, then FCAT the game and then start the three monitor resolutions in terms of relative performance versus quality settings.

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