Mass Effect 2 Graphics Analysis

After taking BioWare's Mass Effect 2 for a spin on over 90 different graphics cards already, PCGamesHardware has kicked up two separate articles (here and here) filled with benchmarks, tuning tips, and comparisons to the original game. ATI Radeon owners should be pleased with the results:
Without Anti Aliasing Mass Effect 2 is running quite smooth, even on entry level graphics cards like the Radeon HD 3870 or the Geforce 8800 GT. With reduced details you can even run it on AMD's old Radeon X1950 XTX (without MSAA but with aberrations). The Geforce 7900 GTX doesn't do so well though. The GF7 can't run Mass Effect 2 with Multisampling AA and thus gets zero fps in the benchmark charts. If you are playing at 1280 x 1024 with 4x MSAA and 16:1 AF you should at least have a Geforce GTS 250 or Radeon HD 4870. For 1680 x 1050 a Geforce GTX 260-216 or a Radeon HD 4890 is required. For 1920 x 1200 you need to bring the big cards - we recommend a Geforce GTX 285 or a Radeon HD 5850.

It is interesting to see that the Radeons are doing very well, especially the Radeon HD 5000 without 4x MSAA. The HD 5870 is up to 41 percent faster than the Geforce GTX 285, which is even beaten by the HD 4890 at 1920 x 1200. With active anti aliasing the results look different though and the GTX 285 is slightly faster than the HD 5850 and the advantage of the HD 5870 is reduced to "only) 12 to 22 percent.