VGA performance: HAWX (DX10.1)

Setup your monitor

Before playing games, setting up your monitor's contrast & brightness levels is a very important thing to do. I realized recently that a lot of you guys have set up your monitor improperly. How do we know this? Because we receive a couple of emails every now and then telling us that a reader can't distinguish between the benchmark charts (colors) in our reviews. We realized, if that happens, your monitor is not properly set up.

This simple test pattern is evenly spaced from 0 to 255 brightness levels, with no profile embedded. If your monitor is correctly set up, you should be able to distinguish each step, and each step should be roughly visually distinct from its neighbors by the same amount. Also, the dark-end step differences should be about the same as the light-end step differences. Finally, the first step should be completely black.
 

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.

We locked our image quality settings to 4x AA, for ATI graphics cards we enable DX10.1 mode.

• 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

For this test (above) we figured it'd be nice to compare with the three cards within its range:

• Radeon HD 4870 1024MB (reference stock clock frequencies)
• Radeon HD 4890 1024MB (reference stock clock frequencies)
• Radeon HD 4890 1024MB Toxic Vapor-X edition

HAWX and Radeon cards really work out well. DX10.1 mode brings additional performance into the gaming arena alright, as such it is totally dominating this test. As you can see, coming from the 4870 which is a brilliant card really, that's a massive speed increase from 1280x720 all the way up-to 2560x1600 where it's still doing 43 FPS on average.

New in our charts are comparison models based on a GPU bound resolution. This particular test has only a couple of entries, but all other gaming titles will include a full comparison of the tested game at 19x12 or 19x10. You can look at these charts as performance VGA charts, per session. Ranking will become very clear this way.

Of course ATI cards dominate thanks to DX 10.1 in this title.