Date:
Tuesday , November 10, 2009
Category:
GPU / Video Cards
Manufacturers:
AMD-ATI & NVIDIA
Author:
Mark Warner
Editor:
Brent Justice

Need for Speed SHIFT Gameplay Performance and IQ

We have an exclusive first look at performance in Need for Speed SHIFT using a new patch due out at the end of this month, as well as a new AMD driver which improves performance in this game. We test gameplay on nine video cards, low end to high end, and examine gameplay performance and image quality.

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Test System Setup

For our test system platform we are using an ASUS Blitz Extreme motherboard with an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770 processor at 3.66GHz, and 4GB of OCZ Platinum series DDR3-1600. For the power supply, we will be using a CoolerMaster Real Power Pro 1250W .

While it might be a bit "overkill," we use the 3.6GHz overclocked quad-core processor to mitigate any CPU-based bottlenecking that we may encounter by using a slower or less powerful CPU.

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Driver Setup

For the NVIDIA video cards, we are using the ForceWare 191.07 WHQL driver. We started this evaluation using ForceWare 195.39 BETA for the NVIDIA-based video cards, but encountered a performance crippling bug during testing. When we contacted NVIDIA about the issue, it said that it was aware of the issue and that it would be fixed in an upcoming driver release later this month when the beta goes WHQL. They recommended that we use ForceWare 191.07 WHQL for now to overcome the performance issue with the Beta driver.

For the AMD video cards, we are using Catalyst 8.663.1 Beta (Hemlock) driver provided by AMD. This new driver also contains performance improvements for NFS Shift that will be included in Catalyst 9.12.

Evaluation Method

We evaluate what each video card configuration can supply us in terms of a playable gaming experience while supplying the best culmination of resolution and "eye candy" graphical settings. We focus on quality and immersion of the gameplay experience rather than how many frames per second the card can get in a canned benchmark or prerecorded timedemo situation that often do not represent real gameplay like you would experience at home. Then we will follow with apples-to-apples testing based on real gameplay as well.