For gameplay evaluations on a 24" widescreen monitor, please head straight to our widescreen performance section.
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 - anti-aliasing 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 argument 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.
Only the XFX GeForce 7950 GX2 570M XXX Edition was capable of playing the game with the maximum image quality enabled, including transparency supersampling. There just wasn't enough memory bandwidth available on the reference clocked GeForce 7950 GX2 to allow for a smooth gaming experience. As a result of this, the standard-clocked GeForce 7950 GX2 delivered a very similar gaming experience to the BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GTX OC.
We think this is either due to a CPU limitation, or the fact that the multi-GPU profile isn't optimised particularly well. Of course, the GeForce 7950 GX2 delivered a higher average and minimum frame rate than the BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GTX OC, but it was not all that much smoother, in all honesty. In a blind taste test, you would be pushed to notice the difference between the two.
On the other hand, the Sapphire Radeon X1900XTX was a little slower than the 7900 GTX OC, despite being able to play the game at the same settings as that and the reference-clocked GeForce 7950 GX2. The gameplay experience was not as smooth as the experience delivered by the GeForce 7-series cards, and there were times where the game appeared to lag for a split second.
With transparency anti-aliasing turned off, the reference-clocked GeForce 7950 GX2 closes the gap between itself and the pre-overclocked XFX 570M XXX Edition. The two single-GPU cards were not too far behind the two GeForce 7950 GX2's.
Need For Speed: Most Wanted:
Publisher: Electronic ArtsWe 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 - anti-aliasing 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 argument for leaving it on the lower setting.
We think this is either due to a CPU limitation, or the fact that the multi-GPU profile isn't optimised particularly well. Of course, the GeForce 7950 GX2 delivered a higher average and minimum frame rate than the BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GTX OC, but it was not all that much smoother, in all honesty. In a blind taste test, you would be pushed to notice the difference between the two.
On the other hand, the Sapphire Radeon X1900XTX was a little slower than the 7900 GTX OC, despite being able to play the game at the same settings as that and the reference-clocked GeForce 7950 GX2. The gameplay experience was not as smooth as the experience delivered by the GeForce 7-series cards, and there were times where the game appeared to lag for a split second.
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