Driving simulations are another genre of games that benefits from Surround Gaming as the wider peripheral vision adds more realism to the driving experience. You can literally see cars passing along on either side of the car.
Generally speaking, driving games aren't my "cup of tea", but I will confess that having forced myself to go out and buy this title as the Surround Gaming feature opened my eyes, so to speak. I really enjoyed playing Nascar 2002.
SETTINGS
Nascar 2002 was tested using the following settings:
Surround Gaming - 2400x600 resolution
Normal - 1024x768 resolution
Trilinear filtering forced via driver
16X FAA enabled where noted
In-game graphics settings at maximum quality
SCREENSHOTS
Here are a couple of comparison screenshots to look at. You should be able to pick out areas where FAA is not doing the job. However, take a look at the job FAA does in/around the windshield, as well as some of the vertical lines nearby.
Normal
Surround
PERFORMANCE
All benchmarks were taken using FRAPS. Driving games are similar to flight sims in that the CPU plays a much larger role in determining the final performance. Therefore, we can expect fairly similar numbers across the board.
Nascar 2002 Performance
Test Mode
Average Frame Rate
Normal
33
Surround Gaming
32
Surround Gaming with FAA
26
Again you can see not a lot of deviation between the various modes. These numbers are consistent with those posted by other grahics cards such as the GeForce4. The important thing to note is that Surround Gaming is a viable option to use.
Of all the games I played, Nascar 2002 is the one that most visibly exhibited the limitations of FAA.
