Sapphire Radeon X1800XL

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.

We tried to turn on High Quality AF and Anti-Aliasing on the Sapphire X1800XL in this title, but found that both were too much of a performance black hole for them to be useful at 1600x1200 0xAA 16xAF. We did find that the Sapphire X1800XL was as fast as the reference 7800 GT. The differences between the two were well within test error and neither was smoother than the other, as we managed to keep the minimum frame rate on both video cards at 30 frames per second.

The BFGTech 7800 GT OC was slightly faster than the X1800XL and reference 7800 GT, but not by a great deal. The same could really be said about the XFX GeForce 7800 GT Extreme too - the minimum frame rate was only two frames higher than the Sapphire X1800XL, while the average frame rate was a mere 4 frames higher. You'd be pushed to notice the difference between these cards in this title.