Gadgetory

hey guys welcome back to harbor unboxed today we'll be checking out a game that ranked very highly on everyone's top 10 list for 2017 that game is of course Mass Effect Andromeda and for good reason the Mass Effect series has been very solid since day one and as such has developed a huge fan base and that fan base has been very keen for an update as it's been something like 5 years since we saw the last installment in the Mass Effect series as the fourth installment the Mass Effect series Andromeda promises to be beer and more beautiful and based on initial impressions it certainly looks as though the game delivers on those promises that says there are a few issues namely the game's poor animations which do spoil the single-player experience somewhat previously the Mass Effect games were built upon the Unreal Engine but with Andromeda a shift to frostbite story was made this movement the buyer had to build all systems tools and assets from scratch ironically a big part of this which was to help enhance character animation so I hope they had more success in other areas although the frostbite 3 game engine does support DirectX 12 the developer has opted to stick with DX 11 at least for now anyway that's not totally surprising though as despite delivering many visually impressive Mass Effect games over the years this series has never really pushed game engines to their limits the previous three installments all use DirectX 9 for example even 2012 Mass Effect 3 stuck with DirectX 9 despite wide use of DirectX 10 at the time and even the availability of DirectX 11 for PC players the developer recommends game is run with ear the intel core i7 4790 or the AMD FX 8350 which is a very odd contrast surely a lower-end Core i5 processor will suffice if they're recommending an FX 8350 clearly these recommendations were made before rise and landed on the graphics card site it suggested that gamers arm themselves as at least a GTX 10 63 gigabyte or a GTX 970 graphics card apparently if you are using a raid on graphics card you're out of luck obviously something like the rx 470 will suffice if they're recommending a GTX 10 63 gigabyte by failing to mention a single AMD graphics cards quite clear this is an nvidia sponsored title so you can expect the green team to have the upper hand at least out of the gate that said AMD who seem to be very much on top of their driver game right now have already released an update to better support the game AMD is claiming performance gains after 12% on the radio and our X 480 with an i7 6700k and 8 gigabytes of ddr4 2666 memory that boost sees frame rates go from 50 3.7 FPS to a much healthier 60 point 1sps at 1080p likely contributing to these performance games or at least a good chunk of them is the added optimized tessellation profile for the game so for testing we use the AMD radeon crimson edition graphics driver seventeen point three point two for testing the Radeon GPUs and then video based GPS were tested using GeForce Camry driver three seven eight point seven eight we benchmark using the core i7 77 ok test machine which sees the processor running at four point nine gigahertz with 32 gigabytes of ddr4 3000 memory the performance numbers that you're about to see are based on a 60 second frat pass from the beginning of the single-player campaign after the player controlled character crash-lands falls onto habitat seven since EA's origin game client locks you out of the game for 24 hours after five hardware changes are made whether like the graphics card or the CPU this made testing painfully slow in the end I had to purchase three copies of the game on three separate accounts just so I could test 15 configurations per day finally for testing we have focused our attention on the ultra quality preset and I have to say that these quality settings the game looks phenomenal we also tested at the three standard resolutions being 1080p 1440p and 4k Before we jump to the benchmark results here's just a quick look at the fraps path I'll show 10 or 15 seconds of it and then I'll slide it up into the top corner there and we'll start looking at the results and discuss those don't read here now that I've got away the energy club reported stamp set it's dark energy but doesn't stain even with Amy's recent driver update the gtx 980ti still enjoys a serious performance advantage over the fury ex delivering 24% more frames on average the 980ti looks very comfortable with a 71 FPS minimum while a fury X dropped down to 54 fps and the standard 980 s slightly slower again at 53 fps I have to say it's not often you see the GTX 970 beating the r9 390x with ease and that's the current situation here the same is true in comparing the r9 380 to the GTX 960 the GeForce graphics card is a whisker faster here and just able to deliver playable performance at 1080p using the ultra quality settings the same can't be said sadly for the r7 370 and gtx 950 though bumping the resolution up to 1440p really hammers performance and now we're looking at just 53 FPS on average from the gtx 980ti with a 46 FPS minimum despite that though Z 982 I was still 23% Fast and the Furious which averaged just 43 FPS for a minimum of 30 FPS gamers will require the r9 390x or GTX 970 if they wish to play at 1440p with all the our candy turned up right so given what we've seen at the previously tested resolutions it's no surprise that even the gtx 980ti can't deliver playable performance at the 4k resolution here we see an average of this 28 FPS with a minimum of 24 FPS the latest crop of GPUs offer more models capable of pushing over 60 FPS at 1080p as you might have expected the Titan XP and GTX 1080i were good for over 100 FPS at all times and averaged around 120 fps the GT X 1080 was also very respectable often pushing frame rates above 100 fps it was a rather large drop down to the gtx 1070 but even so with almost 80 FPS on average performance was still very impressive the gtx 1066 gigabyte easily beats the RX 480 despite AMD's recent rover update and here we see the 488 gigabyte delivering similar performance to 3d about 1060 still we found that GPUs such as the rx 470 and gtx 750ti we're still able to deliver playable performance at 1080p 1440p we see that you can achieve playful performance with the RX 474 gigabyte RS for AT&T gigabyte gtx 1060 if only just having said that though ideally gamers will want at least a gtx 1070 and we do see a rather good argument for going with the GT x 1080 here as it provided 31% more performance taking the average frame rate through 71 FPS again the gtx 1080 TI was just 15% faster than the standard gtx 1080 and frankly i was hoping to see more from in videos new $700 GPU now again at the 4k resolution we find that very few GPUs are capable of delivering smooth performance the GTX a just gets by with a 38 FPS average and a 33 FPS minimum then we have the GTX 1080 TI which delivered just 13% more performance that I have to say the gains were more noticeable here here we have more bars and Alcatraz as I attempt to squeeze all 26 GPUs tested into a single graph here we see that the 980ti roughly matched the gtx 1070 and both really put the fury x in its place meanwhile the three gigabyte 1060 is on par with the r9 nano again this isn't something you often see if ever AMD claims it was the latest drive of the RX 4 he went from 54 fps and their testing to 60 fps well using that very driver we saw at 53 FPS on average this was a clean driver install so there was nothing left behind that could upset performance so either AMD hasn't made any improvements yet or the performance that we would have seen without this driver would have looked very bad indeed I haven't had time to look into this year and with origin constantly locking me out of my multiple copies it's made making further tests a little bit challenging so I'll have to look into that tomorrow moving to 1440p we see similar margins though this time the gtx 1066 gear but does fall behind the fury x and the standard fury that says the three gigabyte gtx 1060 was still faster than the RX 48 year byte and r9 390 GPUs finally at 4k we once again fight there are very few GPUs available right now that will cut it in fact even the Titan XP and GTX 1082 I dip below 40 fps at times which obviously is an ideal for rapping testing up let's see how the gtx 1066 year bike versus RX 488 gigabyte compare side-by-side in the first 30 seconds or so of our benchmark as you can see although the gtx 1060 came out 8% faster at 1080p the overall performance was quite similar the reason for the larger than expected performance variance is down to the fact that when the rs4 idea seen bottoming out at around 48 fps the gtx 1060 is still pushing around 54 FPS or 13% more frames I should also mention that the result seen previously in graph form are based on an average of three runs so the our X 480 minimum is our unusual you will constantly see them before wrapping things up I thought it'd be cool to see how the 7700 K clocked at four point nine yards compares to the horizon 7 1800 X with all cores clocked at 4 gigahertz using the Titan XP so the most part performance was very similar especially in areas where we were seeing heavier CPU load for those of you wondering the CPU utilization looked much the same in the multiplayer portion of the game well there you have it a fairly in-depth look at what it takes to play Mass Effect and all of its glory on the PC ideally though I would have liked to include it a few more tests and look at things such as quality scaling to say the GTX 1060 and rx 480 but ran out of time thanks to Origen constantly locking me out for a 24 hour period due to too many hardware changes so depending on how I go for time over the next few days I would like to revisit the game for more GPU testing and even some CPU testing that's it if I don't get around to doing that right away you can expect to see more testing in the new future as I will be adding this title to the battery of games that are already test with overall Mass Effect Andromeda is an amazing looking game that seems like a lot of fun to play I also had a quick goal to survival-type online multiplayer mode where you join a team of other players and try to defend a wave after wave of AI enemies and yeah that was a lot of fun as well anyway that's all for this one I have some more cool content coming later in the week so watch your inbox I'm your host Steve hope to see you again soon what would happen frustration to hang on