Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 Vapor-X 2GB

What was the last first-person game on the PC to truly blow you away, or offer some unique gameplay experience? New first-person shooters come out quite often, and while some show off some new features and gameplay twists, few of them truly regenerate the genre like we’d hope. Mirror’s Edge is a title that strived to do just that, and for the most part, I’d have to say they’ve done a great job.

First and foremost, Mirror’s Edge isn’t so much a first-person shooter as it is a first-person adventure game, because for the most part, combat isn’t the main focus. Throughout some of the few levels I played through, at times there could be a full ten-minute span without even seeing a single person, which is actually somewhat refreshing. The game focuses on figuring out the best way to get from point A to point B, heavily utilizing the parkour style of travel.

Most levels in Mirror’s Edge offers a similar level of system-intensity, so I based our choice on one that was fun to play through, and one that allowed an easily-replicable run-through. It takes place in chapter six, “Pirandello Kruger”, and Checkpoint A. We begin in a large building, behind a window, looking out at the city. Our run-through takes us outside of this building, down to the street and up to the top of the building shown to the right in the above screenshot.

We see some slight improvement with the latest drivers on the 1680×1050 resolution, but at 1920 and 2560, the performance is essentially identical between the 1GB and 2GB cards. Great performance overall, as long as PhysX isn’t one of your requirements.

With 42.829 FPS on average with 4xAA, we were cutting it somewhat close to what we consider to be a truly smooth gameplay experience for this title, but if you really love your 8xAA, the frame rates you’re left over with are still totally manageable.