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 subtley 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.







DMC4 was a new benchmark for us with this review, and the results really surprised us. Despite it being a part of Nvidia's "The Way It's Meant To Be Played" program, the AMD/ATI cards have an enormous advantage, and seem to scale almost perfectly too, with the 4870 X2 recording results in excess of twice that of the HD 4870 - it's clear the extra memory is helping proceedings along the way!

Meanwhile, the Nvidia cards languish far behind, and at resolutions higher than 1,680 x 1,050, the Powercolor Radeon HD 4850 PCS+ is incredibly able to best Nvidia's GeForce GTX 280, a card well over twice its price! This poor performance from the Nvidia cards certainly seems driver based for the moment, and we'll be looking to see if Nvidia rectify this in the WHQL version of the 177.92 driver.

As expected, the gap between the stock HD 4850 and the Powercolor Radeon HD 4850 PCS+ is never more than a couple of frames per second thanks to the relatively conservative overclock on the 4850 PCS+, with the performance advantage hovering around the three percent mark.