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.







Despite being part of Nvidia's "The Way It's Meant To Be Played" program, we really have to question the driver support Nvidia is currently providing for DMC4 – the performance of Nvidia's cards in comparison to ATI's is pretty embarrassing, and the 9800 GTX+ in SLI utterly fails to scale, with very meagre frame rate advantages over a single 9800 GTX+, and barely playable frame rates at 2,560 x 1,600.

Conversely, the HD 4850s in CrossFire perform excellently, delivering excellent scaling that represents an almost ninety percent performance improvement at every resolution and level of anti-aliasing, and comfortably eclipse the Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 in every test by a significant margin!