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 a part of Nvidia's The Way It's Meant To Be Played programme, this game ends up being faster on AMD hardware pretty much right across the board. We've only tested with anti-aliasing enabled, so there may be occasions where Nvidia is faster when AA is disabled, but the frame rates are generally high enough to leave at least 4xAA turned on. After all, you should be doing that on cards like these in this day and age.

Because of this, the Zotac GeForce GTX 260 AMP²! Edition doesn't really change the performance spectrum in this title - if you want the best performance with anti-aliasing enabled, you're best looking at the ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB.