GeForce 7900 GT head-to-head

Need For Speed: Most Wanted:

Publisher: Electronic Arts

We used the full retail version of Need For Speed: Most Wanted patched to version 1.3. It's the latest addition to Electronic Arts' popular Need For Speed franchise. The game makes use of shaders everywhere, with realistic car reflections, a dynamic sky making use of HDR bloom and also weather patterns that change during the game. Most of the game takes place in the daytime, so aliasing is much more noticeable than it was in previous versions of the Need For Speed: Underground sub-franchise - antialiasing is preferred over a higher resolution in order to combat the edge aliasing.

There is a new setting called Visual Treatment which - when set to high - leaves a bright glow on most objects that get in the way of the sunlight. We feel this looks slightly unrealistic as the effect is over-used to an extent and it's best left set to the low setting with overbright enabled. Along with this, there's also the fact that the high setting causes a big performance drop, giving yet another arguement for leaving it on the lower setting.

We did a manual run through of the Hwy 2001 sprint track that lasts for around 4 minutes. This is sufficient time to experience the rain effect and normal weather conditions in the same run through. The track gives a good idea of what NFS: Most Wanted will perform like on any card, as it goes around most regions in the NFS world. We tested at three resolutions with maximum details to compare the cards in an apples to apples format.

At 1280x1024 with 4xAA, there was very little difference between the BFG Tech and XFX GeForce 7900 GTs. They recorded the same minimum frame rate and the average frame rates were within test error. The BFG Tech 7800 GT OC was slower than the 7900 GTs by around 15% at this resolution. However, all cards were playable and reasonably smooth.

At 1600x1200 with 2xAA, the pattern we were expecting started to appear - with the XFX GeForce 7900 GT XXX Edition being a bit faster than the BFG Tech 7900 GT OC, and the 7800 GT OC being slower still. The game was very playable on the XFX 7900 GT XXX Edition and was reasonably playable on the BFG Tech - there were some lag issues, but it wasn't too dramatic to ruin the driving experience. On the other hand, the BFG Tech 7800 GT OC was not really playable, as there were many occasions where the frame rate dropped to levels that adversely affected the driving experience.

The pattern was very similar at 1920x1200 with 0xAA 16xAF too, but this time only the XFX GeForce 7900 GT XXX maintained a smooth frame rate. With both the BFG Tech 7900 GT OC and 7800 GT OC, driving faster cars was increasingly difficult - the faster the car, the harder it was to control it at the frame rates delivered.