Mass Effect Andromeda PC Performance Review

Mass Effect Andromeda PC Performance Review

Introduction

Mass Effect Andromeda is easily one of the most highly anticipated releases of 2017, bringing the franchise into a whole new Galaxy and into Dice’s Frostbite game engine, ushering the series into a new generation of consoles with support for several new technologies like HDR. 

Older games in the Mass Effect series were not renowned for having high-quality PC versions, with old games in the series coming with framerate limitations and a lack of ultra-widescreen support (both fixable with mods for Mass Effect 3). These old games also suffered from what many would call consolitis, coming with hard to use keyboard/mouse controls on PC and with some disappointingly low-resolution textures.  

With the move to the Frostbite Engine, Mass Effect Andromeda should deliver a much more pleasing expereince on PC, especially for those that want to make use of high-end PC hardware and Ultra-HD resolutions. 

Will Andromeda meet out high expectations for the PC version? 

 

 

Drivers 

 

For this game, we will be using the newest drivers that were available when the game released, which is Nvidia’s Geforce 378.78 driver and AMD’s 17.3.2 driver.

 

Test Setup  

We will be testing this game on our dedicated GPU test rig using both high-end and mid-range GPUs from both AMD and Nvidia. 

 

Game Test Rig
Intel i7 6850K
ASUS X99 Strix
Corsair Vengeance 4x8GB DDR4 3200MHz
Corsair HX1200i
Corsair H110i GT
Windows 10 x64 

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Nvidia GTX 980Ti (Left), AMD R9 Fury X (Middle) GTX 1070 Founders Edition (Right)

 

For the high-end, we will be testing AMD’s R9 Fury X, the GTX 980Ti and Nvidia’s new GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 GPUs.  

For the Mid-range offerings, we will be testing the new RX 480 and GTX 1060, both of which will be the ASUS Strix Gaming models.

 

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ASUS GTX 1060 Strix (Left), ASUS RX 480 Strix (Right)

 

To represent AMD and Nvidia’s lower-end GPU offerings we have decided to use the AMD R9 380 and the Nvidia GTX 960. Both of these GPUs will be the ASUS Strix models. 

Both of these GPUs offer very similar performance in most scenarios and come in at very similar price points, so it will be very interesting to see which GPU will come out on top. 

 

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Nvidia GTX 960(Left), AMD R9 380(Right)

 

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