First up we have Need for Speed: Carbon. Carbon is EA's latest installment in the Need for Speed series. This game has some pretty serious hardware requirements, especially when you crank the graphics settings to max. For testing, I did just that... set everything in the game's options to max and disabled motion blur and V-Sync. I completed a Race Wars race on the Steyne Aqueduct map, which is 2-lap, 9.4 mile race. FPS recording started at "Go" when the green flag was dropped and ended when I crossed the finish line on the final lap. Below are the results we obtained.
The chart we have here tells us a great deal of valuable info. Perhaps the most important bars to look at are the average FPS at each setting. From this, we see a 9.63 increase from stock to overclocked speeds with application-controlled image settings. Overclocking is really not needed at these settings because the game already runs silky smooth at stock speeds. Throw 16x AF and 16xQ AA into the mix and performance drops by nearly 25 FPS at stock speeds. The game is still very playable at these settings, but when you can get a 6 FPS increase just by overclocking... well, why not? As for image quality, Carbon looks absolutely beautiful with all of the eye candy turned on.
Next up we will evaluate performance in Rainbow Six: Vegas. I have owned this game for a few months and can tell you that this game was not playable at max graphics settings on my old 7800 GTX. For testing, I set all of the graphics to max and disabled V-Sync. I conducted the first section of a mission at the Calypso Casino: The Strip. FPS recording started when I touched ground after repelling from the helicopter and ended when the wall was demolished at the other end of the strip. Below are the results we obtained.
The results here are very impressive, considering my former video card was not able to break 20 FPS. Much like Carbon, all of the tested settings were very playable. The performance impact of 16x AF and 16xQ AA was nowhere near as tough as was seen in Carbon.
Just Cause was released last September by Eidos Interactive. A lot of people have not heard about this game which is a real shame. The title is listed as a "Modern Action Adventure" but the best way to describe it is a cross between FarCry and GTA. Just Cause is a free-roaming game which allows you to roam over 1,200 square miles of terrain on foot or in a wide assortment of sea, air or land vehicles completing various missions or just roaming mindlessly. For testing, all of the graphics in the game's options were set to max. I started from the save point "Field of Dreams" and took a 10 minute journey from the starting point to the beach. I tried to follow the same path and use the same vehicles during each test so the results would be more accurate. Below are the results we obtained.
At stock clocks with 16x AF and 16xQ AA enabled, we were getting results that were borderline playable. Overclocking the card helped greatly, providing a gain of almost 18 FPS on average.
We could continue on with more game testing but that would only further solidify what we have seen thus far in our real-world gaming tests and I'm sure you don't care to read through a 15-page review. So what have we learned here today? Move ahead as we offer up our usage, findings and wrap things up with a conclusion.
