Quad SLI: GeForce 7900 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 four 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 video card configuration, 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.

The GeForce 7900 GX2 Quad SLI configuration proved to be faster than the GeForce 7900 GTX SLI setup at 1600x1200. However, the GeForce 7900 GTX SLI results seemed to be reminiscent of the performance we saw on a single card when we did our GeForce 7900 GTX Roundup in March. Out of curiousity, we tested NFS: Most Wanted in single card mode, as well as dual card mode on the NFS World Loop track with the Forceware 84.43 driver. We didn't see a performance benefit in dual card mode at all and experienced very similar frame rates, albeit slightly higher in single card mode.

This appears to be a bug in this driver release, as we tested GeForce 7900 GTX SLI using the 84.17 driver back in March. At that time, we experienced a performance improvement in this title and were able to achieve 56 frames per second average at 1920x1200 2xTMS AA 16xAF with maximum in-game details.

Again, we only saw single card performance on the GeForce 7900 GTX SLI setup at 1920x1200.


Both configurations were unplayable at 2560x1600 0xAA 16xAF.