Mass Effect 2

Electronic Arts’ space-faring RPG is our Unreal Engine 3 game. While it doesn’t have a built in benchmark, it does let us force anti-aliasing through driver control panels, giving us a better idea of UE3’s performance at higher quality settings. Since we can’t use a recording/benchmark in ME2, we use FRAPS to record a short run.

Coming from our past games, Mass Effect 2 throws us a bit of a curveball as it’s the only other game where the GTX 570 has any kind of remarkable disadvantage compared to the GTX 480; albeit tiny, the GTX 570 trails the GTX 480 by around 4% here. This is also one of the smaller advantages for the GTX 570 over the GTX 470, showing a smaller 17% gain. From what we’re seeing with the GTX 500 series, it looks to be the game in our suite most likely to be memory bandwidth bottlenecked.

With that memory bottleneck the GTX 570 doesn’t have a chance to run too far ahead of its AMD competition. At 1920 the performance advantage over the 5870 is only 13%, and of course the SLI/CF cards do quite well here by over 35%.

DiRT 2 Wolfenstein
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  • TheHolyLancer - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link

    likely because when the 6870s came out they included an FTW edition of the 460 and was hammered? Not to mention in their own guild lines they said no OCing in launch articles.

    If they do do OC comp, most likely in a special article, possibly with retail brought samples rather than sent demos...
  • Ryan Smith - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link

    As a rule of thumb I don't do overclock testing with a single card, as overclocking is too variable. I always wait until I have at least 2 cards to provide some validation to our results.
  • CurseTheSky - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link

    I don't understand why so many cards still cling to DVI. Seeing that Nvidia is at least including native HDMI on their recent generations of cards is nice, but why, in 2010, on an enthusiast-level graphics card, are they not pushing the envelope with newer standards?

    The fact that AMD includes DVI, HDMI, and DisplayPort natively on their newer lines of cards is probably what's going to sway my purchasing decision this holiday season. Something about having all of these small, elegant, plug-in connectors and then one massive screw-in connector just irks me.
  • Vepsa - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link

    Its because most people still have DVI for their desktop monitors.
  • ninjaquick - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link

    DVI is a very good plug man, I don't see why you're hating on it.
  • ninjaquick - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link

    I meant to reply to OP.
  • DanNeely - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link

    Aside from apple almost noone uses DP. Assuming it wasn't too late in the life cycle to do so, I suspect that the new GPU used in the 6xx series of cards next year will have DP support so nvidia can offer many display gaming on a single card, but only because a single DP clockgen (shared by all DP displays) is cheaper to add than 4 more legacy clockgens (one needed per VGA/DVI/HDMI display).
  • Taft12 - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link

    Market penetration is just a bit more important than your "elegant connector" for an input nobody's monitor has. What a poorly thought-out comment.
  • CurseTheSky - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link

    Market penetration starts by companies supporting the "cutting edge" of technology. DisplayPort has a number of advantages over DVI, most of which would be beneficial to Nvidia in the long run, especially considering the fact that they're pushing the multi-monitor / combined resolution envelope just like AMD.

    Perhaps if you only hold on to a graphics card for 12-18 months, or keep a monitor for many years before finally retiring it, the connectors your new $300 piece of technology provides won't matter to you. If you're like me and tend to keep a card for 2+ years while jumping on great monitor deals every few years as they come up, it's a different ballgame. I've had DisplayPort-capable monitors for about 2 years now.
  • Dracusis - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 - link

    I invested just under $1000 in a 30" professional 8-bit PVA LCD back in 2006 that is still better than 98% of the crappy 6-bit TN panels on the market. It has been used with 4 different video cards, supports DVI, VGA, Component HD and Composite SD. Has an ultra wide color gamut (113%), great contrast, matt screen with super deep blacks and perfectly uniform backlighting along with mem card readers and USB ports.

    Display Port, not any other monitor on the market offers me absolutely nothing new or better in terms of visual quality or features.

    If you honestly see an improvement in quality spending $300 ever 18 months on a new "value" displays then I feel sorry for you, you've made some poorly informed choices and wasted a lot of money.

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