Mass Effect PC Preview
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The most obvious of these improvements, which was immediately evident, regardless of the fact that we were checking the game out on a 720p HDTV rather than on a higher-resolution monitor, is that the visuals are now much sharper and more detailed. The character models look great, environmental features such as water and foliage are much more believable, and even the textures of the relatively featureless non-story-critical planets look very different now that you can clearly see cracks in the ground, small stones, and such. On one of the planets we were shown during the presentation there were clouds of dusts blowing across the screen, which are in the Xbox 360 game, but which aren't nearly as effective as they are on the PC. We can report that the PC game's textures load much more quickly than those in the console game as well, and while we noticed them popping in on occasion, the problem wasn't nearly as pronounced as it was for Xbox 360 players last year. For what it's worth, the PC version of Mass Effect that we were looking at is still a work-in-progress as well, so it's conceivable that the problem won't be in the finished game at all.
