NVIDIA's GeForce 7800 GTX

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.

When we evaluated SLI last month, we found that Need For Speed: Underground 2 was relatively CPU limited by GeForce 6800 GT SLI. However, we have still experienced some good scaling with GeForce 7800 GTX in both single card and SLI configurations.

With a single GeForce 7800 GTX, we found that 1600x1200 2xAA 16xAF with maximum in-game details provided the basis of a solid and completely playable frame rate, while we were able to increase the in-game quality to 1600x1200 4xAA 16xAF when we added a second GeForce 7800 GTX for SLI mode, while holding a very similar frame rate to the single card configuration.

Two GeForce 6800 Ultra's in SLI mode allowed us to achieve solid game play at 1280x1024 4xAA 16xAF, while a single GeForce 6800 Ultra delivered acceptable performance at 1280x1024 2xAA 16xAF. In contrast, the Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition delivered a very similar performance to GeForce 6800 Ultra SLI, allowing us to attain smooth frame rates at 1280x1024 4xAA 16xAF.

Rather unexpectedly, we found that we were still able to scale pretty well with GeForce 7800 GTX, despite our earlier findings that the title was relatively CPU limited. The 7800 GTX did not show signs of CPU limitation with an Athlon 64 FX-55, but we will be sure to follow this mini series of articles up with a CPU scaling article to find out whether GeForce 7800 GTX is CPU limited in this title in much the same way as appears to be the case in Half-Life 2.

We were able to hold the same frame rate, while increasing the image quality when adding a second GeForce 7800 GTX in to the fray for SLI mode, while GeForce 6800 Ultra also showed similar performance improvements when enabling SLI mode. The Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition was also a solid performer in this title – showing performance similar to that of GeForce 6800 Ultra SLI. We wonder whether that performance will remain the same when we increase the CPU speed.