The Need for Speed franchise takes a turn back to its roots and returns to high-speed daytime racing and outrunning cops in its latest chapter.
A variety of image-enhancing effects have been added giving the gamer more choices to adjust the visuals to their liking, or to what their system can handle.
NFS: MW Demo Test Settings
Performance results were obtained from multiple runs through the Tollbooth time trial in the Challenge Series of the demo. The time trial was selected as it provides a fairly standard mix of outdoor racing with a beautiful backdrop while combining tunnel sequences along with a police chase. The test run commenced at the start of the race and ended at the second set of tollbooths.
NFS: MW Demo Results
The filtering and antialiasing settings were applied in-game. Unfortunately, there isn't much information about which setting is activated when selected. With 4 positions, I've labeled the first setting as level 1, the second as level 2, and the last setting as max (when the line is set all the way to the right).
While being extremely polymorphic, the engines which power The Need for Speed series of racing games are not known for their optimal performance. The engine is CPU limited at 1024x768 as none of the AA settings have the slightest impact on performance.
The 1280x960 and 1600x1200 settings are rather intriguing as additional levels of antialiasing have no noticeable impacts on performance. With that said, I would definitely be gaming at 1280x960 with the maximum antialiasing setting activated.
CONCLUSION
The MSI NX7800GT-VT2D256E is a solid NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT-based graphics card. While it doesn't stray too far from the reference design, MSI has supplied a diverse software bundle, which includes the acclaimed Chronicles of Riddick game along with a decent setup of VIVO cables and multimedia center software.
The graphics cards performed admirably throughout the entire test period and is capable of respectable increases in core and memory clock speeds. We were able to reach 480MHz on the core and 1.12GHz on the memory, which increased performance by 5-10%. And this was within the confines of a closed case without any additional cooling or modification performed on the graphics card.
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