GeForce 7950 GX2 Retail Round-up

For gameplay evaluations on a CRT, please head back to our CRT performance section.

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 - 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.

At 1920x1200, the performance gap between the GeForce 7950 GX2's and the BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GTX OC and Sapphire Radeon X1900XTX started to increase. XFX's GeForce 7950 GX2 570M XXX Edition was able to deliver higher playable image quality than the reference-clocked GeForce 7950 GX2's. Again, the difference in image quality was the difference between transparency supersampling and transparency multisampling.

Both the BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GTX OC and Sapphire Radeon X1900XTX were playable with 2xAA 16xAF enabled, along with maximum details. We enabled high quality anisotropic filtering on the Radeon X1900XTX, but there was not much of a difference in filtering quality when NVIDIA's high quality driver setting was enabled.

Apples to Apples - 1920x1200 2xAA 16xAF

The XFX GeForce 7950 GX2 570M XXX Edition was only marginally faster than the reference clocked GeForce 7950 GX2. The BFG Tech 7900 GTX OC and Sapphire X1900XTX were a step behind in terms of minimum frame rate, but the average frame rate on the BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GTX OC was only around 10% less than the reference GeForce 7950 GX2.