Galaxy GeForce 6600 GT SmartFlash

NFS: Underground 2

Publisher: Electronic Arts

We have used The Need For Speed: Underground 2 here to represent a typical driving simulator - it's based on the DirectX 9.0 API, and makes use of lots of DirectX 9.0 features, including motion blur and light trails. Anti-Aliasing was controlled from inside the game, while Anisotropic Filtering was controlled via the driver control panel, as the game does not feature in-game controls for Anisotropic Filtering.

We used a 3-lap race on the "Parkade Track 1" Street-X circuit with three opponents for our manual run through. The circuit is a fairly high-speed one, but contains lots of corners - it makes good use of motion blur and light trails.

Below is a table of the best-playable settings that we found best for each video card configuration. In this title, we found that 28 to 30 frames per second minimum and a target of 38 frames per second (or higher) for the average frame rate delivered smooth and fluid game play.

Again, we found that Galaxy's GeForce 6600 GT was faster than a Radeon X700 Pro. We were able to attain smooth frame rates at 1024x768 0xAA 16xAF with maximum in-game details. This title is relatively CPU limited in some instances, but we found that we were still able to run with all particle details turned on with the GeForce 6600 GT.

With the Radeon X700 Pro, we found that we had to lower the in-game details ever so slightly - moving the main slider down to 'high' and then going in to the advanced detail settings and removing Anti-Aliasing. We settled on 1024x768 0xAA 8xAF with high in-game quality details delivering the optimum game experience on this configuration.