Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst PC Performance Review

Conclusion

Mirror’s Edge is a game about running quickly through the environment with both grace and precision. In this game having a high framerate is key, giving players more visual information while also making animations look fast and smooth, rather than abrupt and choppy. 

Thankfully Mirror’s Edge can perform great on even lower end hardware, with 1080p barely presenting a challenge to most of the GPUs we tested. Even our GTX 960 and R9 380 are easily able to maintain playable framerates at 1080p hyper settings, which is very impressive given how good this game can look. 

Moving to our high-end R9 Fury X and GTX 980Ti GPUs the game maintained average framerates of well over 60 throughout our 1080p and 1440p testing, with only 4K presenting any real challenge for either GPU. At 4K both GPUs remained completely playable at up to medium settings but after that, both GPUs had problems maintaining a high framerate. 

As we increased the graphical details at 4K other problems became clear on AMD’s R9 Fury X aside from raw GPU horsepower, with the game requiring a larger frame buffer than the R9 Fury X had available. This resulted in AMD’s performance taking a large dip at Ultra and becoming completely unplayable at Hyper settings. It is clear that more powerful GPUs with larger frame buffers will be needed to play this game at 4K Hyper settings.

Control-wise the game plays well, being easy to master and use on both mouse and keyboard and on a gamepad. If the PC controls are not to your liking you can remap the button layout or choose from a selection of controller button layouts, so you should be able to find something that will suit you. 

Throughout my time playing the game I have encountered no bugs to speak of, though some outlets have reported graphical issues and performance problems on Nvidia’s GTX 1080, though this was before Nvidia had released their “Game Ready” drivers of Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst. I would advise that anyone looking to play this game uses the latest GPU drivers in order to get the best experience. 

Visually the game may not be the best available in games today, but it certainly can offer some breathtaking views at times, especially when you look at the games detailed reflections and beautiful cityscape. Even at low setting the environments are detailed and filled with detail, making the city look much more real and alive than the overly clean and crisp aesthetic that the last game presented. Thankfully these great visuals do not come with heavy system requirements, making Mirror’s Edge one of the few games that are both easy to run and nice to look at.  

All in all Mirror’s Edge has very little to complain about on PC when it comes to performance. With current hardware most gamers will be able to run this game at 60FPS or higher, even if your hardware is a little dated. Hopefully, this means that other future EA games will offer similarly impressive PC performance. 

 

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