Final Thoughts

Ideally I would have liked to include some more tests such as quality scaling results for say the GTX 1060 and RX 480, but I simply ran out of time thanks to Origin constantly locking me out for 24 hours after swapping components. That being the case, I will aim to add the GeForce GTX 700 series and Radeon 200 series later this week followed by some CPU testing.

What we can tell you so far is that to enjoy Mass Effect: Andromeda with its best visual settings, you'll require a powerful GPU, even if you plan to play at a resolution of 1080p. Here we really recommend nothing less than the Radeon R9 390 or GeForce GTX 970, though you don't expect to see GPUs such as the RX 480 8GB coming in around the GTX 970. Once AMD further address these performance issues we might see lower-end GPUs such as the R9 380 delivering more acceptable performance here.

Those wanting to game at 1440p will need to bring some serious firepower – the Fury X for example still dipped below 40fps at times. The GTX 1070 or GTX 980 Ti are better picks here and for a constant 60fps+ you'll need a GTX 1080.

To play Andromeda at 4K, you can expect to employ two high-end GPUs. Sadly though, neither SLI or Crossfire are working at the moment so even if you have invested in a pair of GTX 1080s, they won't be particularly useful in this title yet. The good news is that multi-GPU support is coming, hopefully sooner rather than later.

Although we haven't included processor results we can say that the game doesn't seem too CPU-demanding, providing you have a decent quad-core chip. Utilization sat between 30 and 40% for the most part on our overclocked Core i7-7700K test system. However, it's worth noting that RAM usage was extremely high. Our system was configured with 16GB for testing and we constantly saw more than half of that allocated.

Overall, Mass Effect: Andromeda ran perfectly during our benchmarking procedures (no crashing etc.). The game's visual quality is extremely impressive and the gameplay seems like a lot of fun. It's a shame that the experience appears to be spoiled by poor animation.

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