Devil May Cry 4

Publisher: Capcom

Devil May Cry 4 had a relatively quiet introduction to the PC back in February this year, bringing ludicrous demon hack and slashery to the graphical splendour that is DirectX 10. You play as Nero, a member of the Order of the Sword whose job it is to smash, slash and explode as many bizarre looking demons and beasties in the most stylish possible manner. There's a lot more plot in the full game, but damned if we understood much of it.

Devil May Cry 4 (or DMC4 for short) is part of Nvidia's "The Way It's Meant To Be Played" program, and received a significant graphic refit for its PC release. Featuring full Direct X10 support, and with dozens of enemies on screen, the game is surprisingly graphically intensive even when run on the most modern hardware.

We used the game's inbuilt benchmark suite, and have taken our scores from the second test, which is the most graphically intensive. Because DMC4's benchmarks are AI driven, and so subtly different each time they are run, we ran the benchmark three times and have taken an average score for test two as the results below. We tested at 1,680 x 1,050 with 8xAA, 1,920 x 1,200 with 4xAA and 8xAA and at 2,560 x 1,600 with both 4xAA and 8xAA.

Because DMC4 does not support anisotropic filtering as standard, this was forced to 16xAF in the graphics driver control panel.







Devil May Cry delivers some very interesting numbers that go against what we have seen in other games. Typically, the Radeon HD 4870 1GB's extra memory makes little to no difference at lower resolutions, but in DMC we saw a 14 percent performance improvement at 1,680 x 1,050 with 8xAA enabled.

At 1,920 x 1,200, we saw performance increases of around 13 percent with both 4xAA and 8xAA enabled. Finally, at 2,560 x 1,600 we saw improvements of 13.5 percent with 4xAA applied and 12 percent with 8xAA - these represent some quite significant performance advances and when you compare this performance data to the Radeon HD 4870 X2's characteristics, you see that while scaling is very good in DMC, it's not better than perfect (i.e. more than a 100 percent performance improvement).