Connect3D & Sapphire Radeon X1900GT

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 performed a manual run through of the Hwy 2001 sprint track that lasts for around four 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 Need For Speed world. We tested at three resolutions with maximum details to compare the cards in an apples to apples format.

At 1280x1024 4xAA 16xAF, the Radeon X1900GT's were slower than the two GeForce 7900 GT's, but delivered a slightly higher average frame rate than the BFG Tech GeForce 7800 GT OC. However, it's worth noting that the BFG Tech GeForce 7800 GT OC delivered smoother gameplay at these settings, as the minimum frame rate on the X1900GT's dropped below 20 frames per second.

When we increased the resolution to 1600x1200 and set 2xAA 16xAF, we found that the Radeon X1900GT's were actually slower than the BFG Tech GeForce 7800 GT OC. The game wasn't particularly playable at these settings on the two X1900GT's, but then it wasn't playable on the BFG Tech GeForce 7800 GT OC either. We only achieved playable frame rates on the two GeForce 7900 GT's.

The Radeon X1900GT's proved to perform well at 1920x1200 0xAA 16xAF, beating off the BFG Tech GeForce 7800 GT OC. However, it's worth noting that the frame rates delivered by the cards were not high enough to consider the game 100% playable. Only the XFX GeForce 7900 GT XXX Edition was able to deliver a playable frame rate at this resolution.