NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GX2

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 - antialiasing 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 arguement 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. We tested at three resolutions with maximum details to compare the cards in an apples to apples format.

There was very little difference between the four video card configurations at 1280x1024 4xAA 16xAF - ultimately when you've got this much graphics power, there is little need to spend this kind of money to play less intensive games like Need For Speed: Most Wanted at relatively low resolutions.

A gap started to appear between the fastest and slowest video card configurations at 1600x1200 2xAA 16xAF - there was a seven frames per second difference in average frame rate between the GeForce 7950 GX2 and Radeon X1900XTX at these settings, while GeForce 7900 GT OC SLI and the single GeForce 7900 GTX OC performed reasonably similarly.

At 1920x1200 0xAA 16xAF, the GeForce 7950 GX2 loses its advantage due to a lack of Anti Aliasing. It is still the fastest of the four video card configurations tested, but the gap between it and the Sapphire Radeon X1900XTX is reduced to just over five frames per second on average.