Testbed and Methods

To investigate the performance of contemporary graphics accelerators in Mass Effect 2 we put together the following testbed:

• Intel Core i7-975 Extreme Edition processor (3.33 GHz, 6.4 GT/s QPI);  
• Scythe SCKTN-3000 Katana 3 CPU cooler;
• Gigabyte GA-EX58-Extreme mainboard (Intel X58 chipset)
• Corsair XMS3-12800C9 (3 x 2 GB, 1333 MHz, 9-9-9-24, 2T);
• Samsung Spinpoint F1 HDD (1 TB / 32 MB, SATA II);
• Ultra X4 850 W Modular power supply;
• Dell 3007WFP monitor (30", 2560x1600 @ 60 Hz max display resolution);
• Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit;
• ATI Catalyst 10.1 for ATI Radeon HD;
• Nvidia GeForce 196.21 WHQL for Nvidia GeForce.

The graphics card drivers were set up to provide the highest possible quality of texture filtering and to minimize the effect of software optimizations used by default. We enabled transparent texture antialiasing. As a result, our ATI and Nvidia driver settings looked as follows:

ATI Catalyst:

• Smoothvision HD: Anti-Aliasing: Use application settings/Box Filter
• Catalyst A.I.: Standard
• Mipmap Detail Level: High Quality
• Wait for vertical refresh: Always Off
• Enable Adaptive Anti-Aliasing: On/Quality
• Other settings: default

Nvidia GeForce:

• Texture filtering – Quality: High quality
• Texture filtering – Trilinear optimization: Off
• Texture filtering – Anisotropic sample optimization: Off
• Threaded optimization: Auto
• Vertical sync: Force off
• Antialiasing - Gamma correction: On
• Antialiasing - Transparency: Multisampling
• Multi-GPU performance mode: NVIDIA recommended
• Multi-display mixed-GPU acceleration: Multiple display performance mode
• Set PhysX GPU acceleration: Enabled
• Ambient Occlusion: Off
• Other settings: default

Officially, Mass Effect 2 doesn’t support full-screen anti-aliasing, but the support of this function is not restricted in any way in the gaming engine. You can easily force antialiasing using ATI Catalyst driver settings, although Nvidia solutions wouldn’t allow it at first, because the use of FSAA 4x is a so-called de-facto standard among most gamers. Therefore, no wonder the solution appeared pretty quickly. Namely, you have to modify the NvApps.xml file that contains individual Nvidia GeForce settings profiles for various applications. This solution is described in detail in one of the sections of the official Nvidia forum on computer games. Since, we had to achieve maximum image quality and at the same time ensure that ATI and Nvidia solutions would run with comparable driver settings, we did resort to this method for our test session. However, we can’t recommend this solution to inexperienced users. Be aware of the risks and only attempt it if you really understand what you are doing.

16 different graphics cards participated in our today’s performance test session. They can be split in three categories according to their price:

Premium/High-End category:

• ATI Radeon HD 5970
• ATI Radeon HD 5870
• Nvidia GeForce GTX 295
• Nvidia GeForce GTX 285

Performance-Mainstream category:

• ATI Radeon HD 5850
• ATI Radeon HD 5770
• ATI Radeon HD 4890
• Nvidia GeForce GTX 275
• Nvidia GeForce GTX 260

Mainstream category:

• ATI Radeon HD 5750
• ATI Radeon HD 4850
• ATI Radeon HD 4770
• ATI Radeon HD 4670
• Nvidia GeForce GTS 250
• Nvidia GeForce GT 240
• Nvidia GeForce GT 220

We ran the tests in all resolutions including 2560x1600 only for the first two categories. Mainstream solutions were tested in all resolutions except the highest one.

Mass Effect 2 can’t boast extensive list of fine tuning options. Whatever is available looks as follows:

All options, except full-screen anti-aliasing, you see in the table above are available in the game itself. We chose the most resource-demanding mode for our comparative testing and added forced FSAA 4x to it. Mass Effect 2 doesn’t have any built-in benchmarking tools, we used Fraps utility version 3.0.2 in the manual mode to record the average and minimal fps rate. As usual, to minimize the measuring error, we took the average result of three combined runs for further analysis.