HIS Radeon X800GTO IceQ II iTurbo

NFS: Underground 2

Publisher: Electronic Arts

We used Need For Speed: Underground 2 to represent a typical driving simulator - it's based on the DirectX 9.0 API, and makes use of many 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.

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 fairly high-speed, but contains lots of corners, which 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.

In this title, there was an element of CPU limitation in our results, proving that some games do really benefit from having a balanced system. You can read more about CPU limitations in games here.

However, the CPU didn't really have an affect on showing which video card was the fastest in this title. It is not surprising to say that the HIS X800GTO was the fastest video card in this game too. It was the only video card that we found to deliver smooth game play at 1280x1024.

Unfortunately, when we increased the clock speeds utilising the iTurbo mode, we did not see any notable increase in smoothness and we were not able to increase the details by adding Anti-Aliasing in to the fray - we found that 1280x1024 0xAA 16xAF was as good as it was going to get on this video card due to CPU limitations.

The HIS X800GT was the slowest video card in this title, only managing smooth game play at 1024x768 0xAA 16xAF, whilst the 6600 GT and 6800 Std both delivered optimal performance at 1024x768 2xAA 16xAF with all in game details set to their maximum.