NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 Unveiled
Mirror's Edge
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Mirror's Edge is a first person, action-adventure game developed by EA Digital Illusions CE, or DICE. It is powered by a modified version of the Unreal Engine 3, with the addition of a new lighting system, developed by Illuminate Labs in association with DICE. The game has a realistic, brightly-colored style and differs from most other first-person shooters in that it allows for a wider range of actions and greater freedom of movement. We tested the game using FRAPS (there is no built-in benchmarking tool) at resolutions of 1,920 x 1,200 and 2,560 x 1,600 with 4x anti-aliasing enabled and all of the game graphical options set to their highest values. |
Please pay careful attention to the graphs above and note that one set of numbers was recorded with PhysX enabled, while the other set had it disabled. Enabling PhysX within Mirror's Edge on non-PhysX compatible cards, i.e. the Radeons, forces the PhysX effects to be processed on the host CPU.
As you can see in the results above, AMD has a few issues to resolve with this game with the current drivers that are available. For example, the dual-GPU Radeon HD 4870 X2 performed worse than the single-GPU Radeon HD 4870, presumably due to issues related to CrossFire. We have sent a note out to ATI to see if they've got a HotFix driver available for Mirror's Edge, but haven't heard back just yet. If / when a new driver that addresses these issues becomes available, we'll update these numbers as necessary. For now, the Radeon HD 4870 performs relatively well when PhysX is disabled in Mirror's Edge, but with it turned on, neither of the Radeons produce playable frame rates.
The GeForce cards, however, performed very well in this game. With PhysX enabled, the GeForce cards were tightly grouped at 1920x1200, but the GTX 295 was able to flex its muscle a bit once the resolution was increased to 2560x1600 where it pulled ahead by about 13%. With PhysX disabled, much larger deltas separate the GeForce cards, and the GTX 295 finishes well ahead at both resolutions. Once again though, the EVGA GeForce GTX 285 SSC was the fastest single-GPU powered card in the lot.
