Mass Effect 3 Demo Console Performance Analysis

After checking the situation for the retail release of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, the folks at Digital Foundry have turned their attention to the Mass Effect 3 demo, and came up with a short but comprehensive performance analysis. The PlayStation 3 seems to not fare well, but they also see hints that it may be due to the build being unfinished:

So is this unpolished, early code? Can we expect changes in the final game? In the vast majority of cases, playable samplers are entirely representative of the final product, but BioWare does have form in releasing unfinished code for its demos, on PS3 in particular. The Mass Effect 2 PS3 demo ran with v-sync disabled, improving overall frame-rate at the expense of image consistency – this was adjusted in the final version of the game. Similarly, the PS3 version of the Dragon Age 2 demo also saw some changes in its transition to final code.

Perhaps lending further credence to this theory is that the content we’re seeing here isn’t new: the introduction mission has been used in plenty of press material, while the second mission will be familiar to those who witnessed the Kinect voice command demonstration at Microsoft’s E3 press conference. So hopefully we will see improvements to the final game – and of course, we’ll be running a full Face-Off as soon as we can.

Disappointingly enough the PC version wasn’t analyzed this time, though I expect them to rectify this for the full release of the title.