Leadtek 7800 GT and ForceWare 78.03

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.

Again with NFS: Underground 2, we found that there were no problems with having to reduce the image quality when using the ForceWare 78.03 drivers. In fact, this game experienced a slight performance improvement over the ForceWare 77.77 driver. We found that there was a single frame per second performance improvement on the average frame rate.

We ran our manual run through more than our standard three times as we first thought that we were seeing results inside the threshold for test error. After repeated manual run throughs, we were getting consistent results that were a single frame per second higher than what we saw with ForceWare 77.77.