Mass Effect 2007 APU Performance Test

Release Date : September 25, 2009
Genre : RPG (Rogue/Action) | 3D | 3rd Person
Developer : Bioware Corporation and Demiurge Studios

In 2148, artifacts of an ancient civilization were first discovered on Mars. Decades of research later, earthly scientists were finally able to fully understand the technology of aliens, which provided a serious breakthrough in the technological development of our planet - space and time obeyed man, flights to distant star systems became possible. Mankind left its cradle and came into contact with other civilizations of the Galaxy... Almost forty years have passed since the finds on Mars. The Systems Alliance is a dynamically developing interstellar state. The Normandy, the Alliance's most advanced starship, sets out on its first mission. Your name is Shepard, you are assigned as an officer on this ship. Your journey through the galaxy begins...

In this subsection of our review, the main graphical aspects of this game are revealed. Particular attention is paid to the version of the graphics engine used, the version of the API used, graphics settings and the quality of the development of the main visual aspects.

Mass Effect is supported on major Windows operating systems, including Windows XP/Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8/10. Other operating systems are currently not supported by developers and will not receive support. 

 

The priority and primary graphics API for Mass Effect  is  DirectX 9 .

Bulletstorm is based on the Mass Effect game engine. UE3 was designed with personal computers using modern rendering systems (DirectX 9/11 and OpenGL 2/3) and current generation consoles in mind. Due to the widespread use of multiprocessor systems, the engine uses two parallel main threads - the main thread (responsible mainly for the game process) and the rendering thread.

 

In addition to the two main threads, secondary threads can be called, which perform one-time tasks. Support for multi-threaded dynamic data loading (streaming) has appeared, for example, loading a “location” directly when moving around it in order to save resources. The updated graphics engine supports most modern technologies, including HDR, per-pixel lighting, dynamic shadows, shader model 4, geometry shaders. The graphics pipeline itself was transferred under the control of shaders. The physical subsystem Karma was abandoned in favor of another called PhysX from NVIDIA. Later, NVIDIA released a set of additional libraries for the game, allowing you to use all the features of the physical system (such as the effect of "fluid" or tissue). The FaceFX mechanism is responsible for the animation of the faces of the characters.

Updated EAX version to 5th. Added support for SpeedTree for generating trees. The emphasis was on additive geometry, but support for subtractive geometry was not abandoned. The disadvantage of subtractive geometry in the first place is a much longer lighting calculation. A new UnrealEd editor has been introduced, rewritten using wxWidgets.  

The difference between AMD and Intel solutions is almost imperceptible.

Our APUs were tested at  1680x1050 resolution with the highest  graphics quality settings allowed by the game. For some reason, the real resolution of 16x9 is not activated in the game, the maximum is 1680x1050...

Testing at  high  quality settings 1680x1050

 

AMD is slightly better suited for comfortable gaming...

Testing of the video memory consumed by the game was carried out by the  MSI Afterburner program. The results were taken on  Core i 7 5775C and AMD A10-7870K systems at 1920x1080  resolutions   with high quality settings.

Testing at high  memory GPU quality settings 

 

At a resolution of 1280x720, the APU's video memory consumption is 350  MB of video memory. 

Loading of processor cores  at high quality settings 1680x1050  % 

 

When using integrated graphics solutions, the game is capable of supporting up to 8 computational threads. 

 

The test was conducted on the base configurations Core i 7 5775C and AMD A10-7870K with 8 GB DDR3/4 2666 MGz pre-installed memory. The test of RAM on the entire system was carried out without running extraneous applications (browsers, etc.).

Testing system RAM consumption 

 

If you have a system with  a Core i 7 5775C, the game  consumes 4.5 gigabytes of RAM. With a system based on  AMD A10-7870K,  the RAM consumption of all RAM was 2.5 gigabytes.