Mirror’s Edge Graphics

Unfortunately though we think that Mirror’s Edge may have spent a bit too long on consoles as the options for fiddling with the graphics are pretty limited.

Very limited in fact. There’s an AA slider, an all-powerful and massively vague Graphics Quality setting, a texture resolution option and a PhysX toggle for those who don’t have Nvidia cards…and that’s about it.

Which isn’t to say that the game looks bad though. It doesn’t. Mirror’s Edge actually looks very, very good; by far one of the most artistic and beautiful uses of the Unreal 3 engine we’ve yet seen. Also, even when the attention to detail does dip a little and the textures and so forth start to suffer then it doesn’t matter hugely because you’re moving too fast to notice them.

Still, if you’re anxious to know how well the game scales and how the game might look on your system then you can check out our guide below. We’ll start by looking at the games graphical quality.

Graphics Quality

The Graphics Quality slider has five settings, but no real explanation to it. It doesn’t tell you whether it controls view distance, model detail, texture size, or how many poodles appear in the game. We’re guessing it controls a mixture of all the above, but it’s kind of hard to tell. See how many poodles you can see in the screenshots below.


More important than how many poodles you can spot though (there are six, total) is whether or not you can see a difference in how the screenshots above look. Because we can’t.

Looking in the foreground, the number of shadows and the detail on the textures seems the same across all screenshots and settings. Examining the background too shows that there’s a similar amount of detail in the distance. Nothing really can be seen to have changed. We’re flummoxed.

Our recommendation then is that, since the system requirements for Mirror’s Edge aren’t exactly high, you’d be best off putting this setting on high and lowering it only if you have framerate problems.

Anti-aliasing

Anti-aliasing, or AA, is the system by which the engine for Mirror’s Edge smoothes out rough edges by blurring pixels together. If you’re getting rough and jagged vertices when you play a game then you need to up this slider. Or see a doctor.


Anti-aliasing may not look to have a huge impact in these screenshots, but when you actually play the game for extended periods then it’s a totally different matter. It’s the difference between seeing a bale of barbed wire and then wrapping your eyeballs in it.

Mirror’s Edge is a game of precision, where you’ll have to time your jumps carefully and be sure to leap only from the from tip of the precipices lip if you want to survive – a fact that makes the game occasionally frustrating. Unlike other first person games you aren’t darting your eyes from one character to another, but from platform to another; if the lines are jagged, you’ll notice.

That said, the game is still very playable without the AA, so if you can’t reach the higher settings then you don’t need to worry about it too much – the important thing is having a stable framerate afterall.