Devil May Cry 4 Benchmark

Devil May Cry 4 was released for the PC platform in early 2007 as the fourth installment to the Devil May Cry video game series. DMC4 is a direct port from the PC platform to console versions, which operate at the native 720P game resolution with no other platform restrictions. Devil May Cry 4 uses the refined MT Framework game engine, which has been used for many popular Capcom game titles over the past several years.

MT Framework is an exclusive seventh generation game engine built to be used with games developed for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, and PC ports. MT stands for "Multi-Thread", "Meta Tools" and "Multi-Target". Originally meant to be an outside engine, but none matched their specific requirements in performance and flexibility. Games using the MT Framework are originally developed on the PC and then ported to the other two console platforms. On the PC version a special bonus called Turbo Mode is featured, giving the game a slightly faster speed, and a new difficulty called Legendary Dark Knight Mode is implemented. The PC version also has both DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 mode for Windows XP, Vista, and Widows 7 operating systems.

It's always nice to be able to compare the results we receive here at Benchmark Reviews with the results you test for on your own computer system. Usually this isn't possible, since settings and configurations make it nearly difficult to match one system to the next; plus you have to own the game or benchmark tool we used. Devil May Cry 4 fixes this, and offers a free benchmark tool available for download. Because the DMC4 MT Framework game engine is rather low-demand for today's cutting edge video cards, Benchmark Reviews uses the 1920x1200 resolution to test with 8x AA (highest AA setting available to Radeon HD video cards) and 16x AF.

Devil May Cry 4 is not as demanding a benchmark as it used to be. Only scene #2 and #4 are worth looking at from the standpoint of trying to separate the fastest video cards from the slower ones. Still, it represents a typical environment for many games that our readers still play on a regular basis, so it's good to see what works with it and what doesn't. Any of the tested cards will do a credible job in this application, and the performance scales in a pretty linear fashion. You get what you pay for when running this game, at least for benchmarks. This is one time where you can generally use the maximum available anti-aliasing settings, so NVIDIA users should feel free to crank it up to 16X. The DX10 "penalty" is of no consequence here.

The GTX cards from NVIDIA stage a comeback in Devil May Cry 4, but the 5870 cards still take top place. The ASUS EAH5870V2 takes full advantage of the 18% overclock, even at these crazy frame rates, putting up 18% higher frame rates than the 5870 with stock clocks. You can't ask for more than that. I love the fact that this benchmark doesn't seem to get bottlenecked by the CPU, even at these crazy high frame rates.

In Scene #4, the GTX cards pull even closer, but are still about 30 FPS behind the 5870 pair, not that you would notice the difference in game play, at 90+ FPS. The 18% overclock on the Radeon HD 5870 nets a 15% increase in frame rates in this scene; a significant improvement, even if it doesn't quite match the gain from scene #2.

Our next benchmark of the series is not for the faint of heart. Lions and tiger, fine. Guys with guns, I can deal with that. But those spiders......NOOOO! How did I get stuck in the middle of a fight between Aliens vs. Predator anyway? Check out the results from our newest DirectX11 benchmark in the next section.

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