Mass Effect Andromeda Notebook and Desktop Benchmarks

For the original German article, see here.

Technology

Unsurprisingly, EA uses its regular Frostbite engine for Andromeda, which is now in its third generation and had been created by the Battlefield developer DICE for its own multiplayer shooter. Other games developed by EA in the past few years, such as the football simulation FIFA 17, the parkour-game Mirror's Edge Catalyst, the action-racing game Need for Speed or the monumental RPG Dragon Age Inquisition, prove that the engine is impressive even outside of Battlefield.

Talking about Inquisition: Many fans initially feared that Mass Effect Andromeda would inherit the weaknesses of the last Dragon Age scion (above all, the vast amount of boring run-of-the-mill quests). As far as we can judge based on the first few hours of the game, Andromeda's staging is not as captivating as its predecessor in terms of story and characters. Although there is a lot to discover on the open-world planet surface, we would not describe the gameplay as extremely absorbing.

At least the battles have improved significantly. When disregarding the not very reliable ambient occlusion, many optimizations that contribute to the speed and strategic options become apparent. Thanks to the jet pack that the hero has from the beginning, controlling battles is smoother and are more fun - despite the stupid enemies and accompanying AI.

Thus, it is all the more aggravating that the animations, which make up a significant part of the game (keyword: dialogues), are unsatisfactory. In addition to the mimics and facial proportions, the running patterns are often unintentionally funny and look terribly outdated for a triple-A game from 2017. Thus, the somewhat exaggerated article title "Wooden effect".

Andromeda scores relatively well in the other categories. The wide, full of atmosphere areas created with an eye for detail usually stand out with sharp textures, 3D-like objects, and modern graphics gimmicks. In particular, the lighting, the shadows and the reflections at higher levels appealed to us. This brings us to the video and graphics settings that are divided into two menus (see screenshot below). The developers have conveniently integrated several presets so that the player does not have to adjust every setting individually.

While Andromeda does not look convincing in minimum settings due to vague textures, lack of reflections, pixelated shadows, and coarse outlines, the universe is well depicted from medium settings onward, although FXAA only smoothes the edges roughly. The high preset improves the looks considerably because the edges benefit from TAA and the plants and shrubs benefit from the ambient occlusion HBAO. The difference between high and ultra is limited. No wonder, as not all options have been exhausted in the highest level. Players who want to enjoy Andromeda in its full beauty will have to make adjustments manually.

We also had to make manual adjustments for our benchmarks because the game uses another resolution that is scaled up in low to high presets. Even more annoying: To disable the corresponding option (Resolution Scale Mode), the user first has to press ESC after selecting the presets, then return to the graphics menu, change the total quality to custom, and finally press ESC again. To make things even more complicated, Mass Effect asks for rebooting after selecting a specific setting.

At least the user does not face a torrent of videos at the start. The loading times are acceptable when an SSD is inside the system. Downloading requires a lot more patience. Almost 44 GB takes a long time even with a fast Internet connection (~ 2 hours @ VDSL 50).