by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko
02/12/2010 | 12:54 PM
Hard science fiction is a literature genre for intellectuals. As opposed to space operas or hackneyed fantasy worlds, it is based on a scientific basis that does not allow far-fetched inventions. Although hard sci-fi can describe phenomena we don’t have with the current level of technology such as space travel, an author willing to follow the glorious path of such classics as Arthur Clarke, Robert Heinlein or Stanislaw Lem has to curb his fantasies and take a scientific approach. This naturally requires vast, encyclopedic knowledge in many fields of scientific research. No wonder that this intellectually challenging genre is not really for the masses and there are very few worthy works in it, especially if you take such a recently developed (in comparison with cinema or literature) entertainment as video games. And it is even harder to find a well-made RPG game with a sci-fi plot because RPGs are all about elves, orcs, mages and all kinds of other fantastical but absolutely unscientific creatures the authors don’t even care to explain the existence of. Recalling RPG games with a sci-fi element, we can only come up with the post-apocalyptic Fallout, the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic series, and the highly creative Arcanum.
Against this bleak background, the star of Mass Effect came to shine especially brilliant three years ago. The game was doomed to be a success because it had been developed by the BioWare studio. This name rings all the bells with each RPG fan as this developer has produced such famous titles as Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, and the above-mentioned Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. In the best traditions of the popular space series Star Trek and Babylon 5, the story of adventures of Commander Shepard and the crew of the experimental space frigate Normandy won the hearts of all cRPG players who had longed for a good piece of hard science fiction. Mass Effect was a detailed and large world where you did not find typical good and bad guys. Every party in the game had its own truth which you could understand if not accept.
We had a look at Mass Effect soon after its release, noting a few shortcomings such as a somewhat linear plot and simplified graphics (this simplification helped it run on game consoles fast, however). Anyway, the game took a deserved place among the best representatives of the cRPG genre and was hailed as one of the best sci-fi games ever. But that was only the beginning. BioWare had conceived Mass Effect as the first part of a trilogy. It is too early to talk about the third part, but the second part, officially released on the 26th of January 2010, is right here for us to play. So, we will run it a little to see how its system requirements have grown up over the last three years and whether a Mass Effect fan has to upgrade his gaming platform to enjoy the second installment.
Mass Effect 2 begins in the year of 2183 soon after the events of the first part of the game. Patrolling for Geths, the race of sentient machines striving to destroy all organic life in the galaxy, the Normandy frigate is suddenly attacked by an unknown enemy. The damage is too heavy, and the crew are leaving the ship in rescue capsules. The protagonist – it’s Commander Shepard again – is trying to get the reluctant helmsman into the lifeboat but the splinters puncture his spacesuit. You don’t often see a protagonist die right at the beginning of a story, but it turns out that Shepard’s body is being revived by an organization called Cerberus as part of their Lazarus project.
The resurrection attempt eventually succeeded in 2185 and Commander comes to, but only to find out that Cerberus’ space station was being attacked by cracked and reprogrammed guard robots. Shepard helps two Cerberus agents escape and is taken to the organization’s headquarters where they tell him that he had been resurrected and his body had been improved in exchange for his help in investigating mysterious cases of human colonists disappearing without a trace. Shepard and his team go to one of the recently attacked colonies and learn from the records they find there that a race of insect-like Collectors is behind the abductions. On board the newly rebuilt Normandy, Commander Shepard begins to pick up crew members for one of his most dangerous missions.
Like in the original game, the protagonist can be either man or woman. A rare option in video games, you can import your saved games from the first Mass Effect and the actions you had taken there will affect the events of Mass Effect 2. If you haven’t played the first part or don’t have any saved games from it, you can create your character from scratch by choosing such parameters as sex, class, appearance and background.
There are as many as six classes: Soldier, Adept, Engineer, Infiltrator, Sentinel and Vanguard. The names are quite self-descriptive. For example, a Soldier is a specialist of hand-to-hand combat and can use all types and classes of weapons available in the game. An Infiltrator prefers to hide and use a sniper rifle. An Adept relies on biotechnologies while an Engineer, on machines. The Sentinel and Vanguard classes are somewhere in between, one combining bio- and ordinary technologies and another, biotech and combat skills. But even with the most combat-oriented class you cannot pass through the game by simply destroying everything around you. Mass Effect 2 won’t allow you to stand full height and shower your enemies with fire from a big gun. You have to look for shelters if you want your character to live through the combat. The use of weapons has changed in Mass Effect 2. Weapons used to overheat and could not fire infinitely, but now the overheat is replaced with disposable heatsinks which are like ammo in other games. Bullets with special effects are now equal to special abilities. Another interesting feature of Mass Effect 2 is the Quick Time Events. At some critical moments in the dialogue the gamer has to quickly choose a bad or good-aligned choice as long as the icon in the left or right corner of the screen is blinking. If no choice is made, the gamer won’t be punished. The game will just go on, but the delay will affect the rest of the plot and may hinder the progress of some missions.
From a technical point of view, Mass Effect 2 is based on the same Unreal Engine 3 as the first part of the game, but the engine has been upgraded to version 3.5. It now supports ambient occlusion which improves the quality of shadowing and lighting. The max number of characters that can appear simultaneously in the screen has been increased. The simulation methods for water surfaces have been revised. The physics of soft bodies and destructible environments has improved. All of this can be easily observed in the quality and level of detail of the game’s visuals. There is nothing you may find fault with, except for not-very-detailed textures, but this should be expected from a multiplatform project (like its precursor, Mass Effect 2 is released on the PC and the Xbox 360 whose graphics capabilities, comparable to those of the ATI Radeon X1900, are not high by the standards of 2010). BioWare’s designers have done a good job masking the low-quality textures with eye-catching special effects and thought-through level design. Besides, the multiplatform nature of this project implies modest system requirements of the PC version, meaning that you won’t have to buy a $400 Radeon HD 5870 or a more expensive Radeon HD 5970 to experience the Mass Effect 2 world in its entire splendor. Well, let’s just check this out in practical tests.
To investigate the performance of contemporary graphics accelerators in Mass Effect 2 we put together the following testbed:
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:
Nvidia GeForce:
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:
Performance-Mainstream category:
Mainstream category:
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.
Despite the huge advantage in specs, the world’s fastest serially produced graphics card Radeon HD 5970 is only as fast as the GeForce GTX 295 at the two lower resolutions. AMD’s flagship product can only show its best at 1920x1200 and 2560x1600 where it enjoys an 11% and 32% lead over its opponent, respectively. Both cards always deliver a playable frame rate, their bottom speeds never sagging below 25fps even at the highest resolution, yet AMD’s card is the winner. Nvidia’s product is slower at high resolutions and less available in shops than the Radeon HD 5970.
When it comes to single-processor cards, the Radeon HD 5870 and GeForce GTX 285 go neck and neck till the resolution of 2560x1600 where the latter suddenly slows down, the gap amounting to 25%. Well, the bottom speed of both cards is equally low and barely playable, so if you have a 30-inch monitor and want to play Mass Effect 2, you may want to consider the dual-processor solutions.
The cards are equal at 1920x1200, so the choice depends on your particular preferences. Our favorite is the Radeon HD 5870 as it is 50 to 100% faster than the GeForce GTX 285 in most other games. The Mass Effect 2 engine just seems to prefer Nvidia’s scalar architecture.
Thus, we recommend AMD’s single- and dual-processor solutions to you, although we must acknowledge that Nvidia’s products, theoretically less advanced, are not far inferior in this particular game.
The competition is tougher in the Performance-Mainstream category, particularly because there are more products in it. The best result at the resolution of 1280x1024 and 1680x1050 is delivered by the GeForce GTX 275 but the Radeon HD 5850 goes ahead at 1920x1200 and 2560x1600. AMD’s card manages to maintain a near-comfortable frame rate in highest display mode: the game is playable although some jerkiness may occur in certain scenes. Thus, the Radeon HD 5850 is the overall winner among fast single-processor graphics cards especially as its effective retail price has already dropped to about $300. Purchasing a Radeon HD 5850, you get a comfortable performance in Mass Effect 2, an advantage over the GeForce GTX 275 across a majority of other games, and DirectX 11 support!
As for the less advanced products, the Radeon HD 4890 does well, outperforming the GeForce GTX 260 at high resolutions. These cards are slow at 2560x1600 but make the game playable at 1920x1200. It is harder to choose between them as the GeForce GTX 260 is ahead of the Radeon HD 4890 in terms of power consumption and is also quieter. As opposed the fifth Radeon HD series, the fourth one does not have the DirectX 11 trump. Therefore, we’d probably prefer the GeForce GTX 260. Take note of the modest Radeon HD 5770, too. Although its performance is obviously limited by the 128-bit memory bus, it is a mere 8% behind the GeForce GTX 260 at 1920x1200, making the game just as enjoyable. It can also be found at a lower retail price ($160-180) than Nvidia’s card ($190-220).
So, our favorites in the upper and lower segments of the Performance-Mainstream category are AMD’s products, too. The company deserves this, especially as the Radeon HD 5850 is the only card in this category to make the game playable at 2560x1600. Nvidia’s products allow playing the game comfortably at resolutions up to 1920x1200 with full-screen antialiasing.
The struggle gets even hotter in the sector of inexpensive, yet still rather fast, gaming graphics cards. There are two leaders in the upper segment: the old but sturdy Radeon HD 4850 and the venerable GeForce GTS 250 which traces its origin back to Nvidia’s early cards with unified architecture. These two go neck and neck at 1280x1024 but the red team runner goes ahead at 1680x1050, enjoying an 8% lead. At the resolution of 1920x1200 the Radeon HD 4850 remains the only card capable of delivering a playable frame rate. The Radeon HD 5750 betrays the developer’s desire to cut the manufacturing cost by any means. Having a 128-bit memory bus, it is inferior to its architecturally less advanced predecessor which has a 256-bit bus.
LCD monitors with a native resolution of 1920x1200 or 1920x1080 have already become quite affordable, but if you’ve got one such monitor and don’t have much money for a graphics card, you can only choose the Radeon HD 4850 because the Radeon HD 5750 is definitely slower while the other inexpensive cards are even more sluggish. And if you’ve got a modern 20- or 22-inch monitor with a native resolution of 1680x1050 pixels, the Radeon HD 5750 is going to be the optimal choice as a more progressive, cheaper and quieter alternative to the GeForce GTS 250.
As for the Radeon HD 4770 and GeForce GT 240, they only make the game playable at resolutions not higher than 1280x1024 if you use 4x FSAA. Nvidia’s card looks preferable as it consumes less power. The cheapest products such as the GeForce GT 220 and the Radeon HD 4670 are no good even at 1280x1024, their bottom speeds being below playable. Of course, you can try to achieve a comfortable frame rate by turning FSAA off and lowering the level of detail, but some of the game’s beauty will be lost.
Our tests suggest that, although Mass Effect 2 obviously prefers Nvidia’s graphics architecture, AMD’s solutions win in every price category, from high-performance dual-processor monsters to humble $150 mainstream products, just because their architecture is more effective.
There is not much left for us to do. We want to know how the game behaves at different graphics quality settings and whether the CPU frequency affects the frame rate. For this test we used two characteristics representatives of the AMD and Nvidia camps: Radeon HD 5850 and GeForce GTX 285. Both cards were tested with Core i7-975 Extreme Edition and Core i7-920 processors. The display resolution was set at 1680x1050 to avoid reaching the ceiling set by the graphics card’s capabilities.
For each of the four profiles with settings we were recording the instantaneous frame rate for 60 seconds with the Fraps 3.0.2 utility. The test included various scenes, both in and outdoors. Additionally, we captured a few screenshots that help visually evaluate the difference in image quality between the mentioned profiles.
And here are the results of this test:
We can see no difference between the two cards from AMD and Nvidia when FSAA is turned on. They behave in the same manner, depending on the particular game scene, but not on the CPU installed in the computer. The graphs lie close to each other. We can only note that the GeForce GTX 285 ensures a somewhat higher bottom speed but the Radeon HD 5850’s frame rate is never lower than 55 fps despite the full-screen antialiasing. The graphics quality is high at these settings and there is no need to lower them.
When 4x FSAA is turned off, the frame rates grow higher and the graphs become more jagged. The ATI Radeon HD 5850 is obviously faster now, although this has no practical worth because both cards are 100 fps and faster. It is also clear that Mass Effect 2 is not a game with high system requirements. After all, it is a multiplatform project, released for the PC and Xbox 360. As for the quality of the visuals, the special effects like “film grain” make the picture as good as with FSAA. It’s even hard to see that there is no FSAA here. In fact, you don’t have to force FSAA because the successfully implemented special effects conceal the aliasing defects very well.
When we disable most of the post-processing effects, the game’s lighting and shadowing deteriorate, yet the game doesn’t look ugly. The frame rates grow higher, but there is no point in trying to boost the speed more if you already have an average frame rate of 160-170 fps. You may only need this on old graphics cards like GeForce 6 or Radeon X1000. We can’t see any sign of the CPU’s influence on the results here.
At the minimum level of detail the GeForce 285 and Radeon HD 5850 are as high as 200 fps and more, but there is absolutely no point in using such settings. We must acknowledge that the game still looks decent, testifying to the great job done by BioWare’s artists and designers. It means that this game can be played even on entry-level computers with integrated graphics or the first generation of DirectX 9.0c graphics cards.
So, Mass Effect 2 does not really need full-screen antialiasing. It looks splendid without FSAA while its frame rate goes up, so you can turn on the highest graphics quality settings even on an inexpensive graphics card. In fact, the game’s system requirements are so modest that the frame rate is playable at the best settings on a system with an Athlon 64 X2 5000+ and a Radeon HD 3850 256MB graphics card. Moreover, the game does not lose its visual quality much even if you disable or lower some of its settings, so you can even try to run it on a still weaker configuration. Cutting it short, if you liked the first game, you don’t have to upgrade your computer in order to enjoy the second part. This is a rare thing in the gaming world, really. The developers from BioWare who worked on Mass Effect 2 deserve our special praise!
We have been waiting long for Mass Effect 2 and our expectations haven’t been disappointed. The second Mass Effect is not only a treat to the eye but also a real pleasure for every fan of science fiction. Like the famous first part, the second offers a detailed world, an engaging plot and lots of gameplay options. The merits of the sequel have been highlighted in numerous positive reviews some of which already claim Mass Effect 2 to be the best of 2010 even though the year has just begun. The game is doomed to be a bestseller and we will use it in our reviews of graphics cards as a benchmarking tool.
The visual aspect of the game is nearly blameless. We can only cavil at the simplified textures, which are expected from a multiplatform project, and the nontrivial way of turning FSAA on with Nvidia’s cards. On the other hand, the aliasing defects are masked by clever post-processing effects and the game runs much faster without FSAA.
You don’t have to pay a few hundred dollars for a graphics card like Radeon HD 5970 to enjoy the beauties of Mass Effect 2. The game runs well even on such modest solutions as Radeon HD 5770. Based on Unreal Engine 3.5, Mass Effect 2 is predisposed to the superscalar architecture of Nvidia’s GPUs, but AMD’s Radeon HD 5x00 is so superior to the GeForce series from a technical point of view that they easily make up for the game’s preferences with their more effective architecture. So, it is the different Radeon HD models that are the best choice for playing Mass Effect 2 in nearly every price category, from the dual-processor monster Radeon HD 5970 to the popular hit Radeon HD 4850. Yes, the latter card, announced nearly 2 years ago, is quite capable of running one of the best games of 2010 at the highest settings together with 4x FSAA and at resolutions up to 1920x1200!
Although we recommend ATI Radeon HD solutions for Mass Effect, Nvidia’s products should also be given credit for coping with Mass Effect 2 successfully. The only exception is the architecturally and technically outdated GeForce GTS 250. Thus, the choice of the particular GPU brand depends on your personal preferences as well as on what other games you are going to play. For some people a GeForce GTX 275/285 is going to be a better buy than a Radeon HD 5850. Nvidia’s flagship GeForce GTX 295 will also be able to cope with its job even at 2560x1600.
Mass Effect 2 does not need a top-end CPU. Our test showed no difference between a Core i7-975 Extreme Edition and a Core i7-920. We expect that popular inexpensive models of Intel’s Core i5 processors for LGA1156 will also suffice for Mass Effect 2. AMD’s similar products will do, too.
So, Mass Effect 2 is yet another high-quality title that is ready to please any sci-fi fan. It is good that this undoubtedly exciting game does not call for a super-fast gaming platform or an expensive upgrade. A graphics card of the Radeon HD 5750 class will be perfectly enough. You don’t have to worry even if you’ve already got a Radeon HD 4850 or GeForce GTX 260. These time-tested solutions will serve you well in Mass Effect 2, too.