Tom Clancy's HAWX

HAWX is one of several games we used in this review that probably delayed our publication date by causing me to conduct additional, uh, testing beyond the necessary amount. I haven't seen too many good flying games lately, and the mix of arcade, sim, and RPG (really) elements in HAWX makes quite the cocktail.

At least, that's my excuse.

HAWX will run in DirectX 9, but it looks best in DX10, where some additional lighting effects come into play, including ambient occlusion. This game also uses DirectX 10.1 to improve performance on Radeon graphics cards.

For the record, DirectX 10.1 is a set of extensions to Microsoft's main graphics programming interface. DX10.1 gives developers more control over the way antialiasing hardware operates and enables a new form of data organization, a cube map array, that can help accelerate certain lighting algorithms, including an approximation of global illumination. Both of these things typically result in performance increases, if developers take advantage of them. Since DX10.1 compatibility is an all-or-nothing deal and today's GeForces can't support the full DX10.1 feature set, no current GeForce GPU can claim to be DX10.1 compliant. AMD has taken an active role in encouraging game developers to use DX10.1, and some recent games like this one make use of it, as a result.

We tested the 4770 with both DX10 and DX10.1 to see the difference, using 1680x1050 resolution with all of the in-game quality options at their best and 4X AA enabled.

The newest Radeon runs HAWX faster than the 9800 GT either way, but turning on DX10.1 gives it an additional boost. This one isn't even close—the 9800 GT's average frame rate is lower than the 4770's minimum.