Need for Speed Carbon
The latest entry in the Electronic
Arts Need for Speed franchise (and loosely
based on The Fast and the Furious Tokyo Drift
movie), in
Need for Speed Carbon
you’re a street racer out to rebuild your reputation
as you battle rival racing crews and escape police
pursuits. The game makes heavy use of highly
detailed car models, motion blur and nighttime
lighting effects that can really tax frame rates.
TOCA Edit’s
Custom Resolution Launcher for Need
for Speed Carbon was used
to force the game’s resolution to 1920x1200, as the
game has no native widescreen support. FRAPS was
used for a four-lap Circuit race on the Main
Street track with my crew member, 6 opponents
(the maximum) and Traffic Level set to
High, using the game’s Quick Race
feature.
Once again, we witness the EVGA
e-GeForce 8800 GTX’s ability to deliver
playable, hitch-free frame rates at a resolution and
anti-aliasing levels that previous generation cards
would struggle with. Even the motion blur effect
looks better! Notice again the relatively minor
penalty in frame rates between the 4x TR MSAA, 8x
CSAA and 16x CSAA settings. Surprisingly, Need
for Speed Carbon was the most playable game of
the group at 16xQ CSAA with just one slow-down
(which was always on the same spot on the track).
1920x1200 Hi-Res Screenshots
Click to enlarge
Because the game takes place at night
and you spend most of your time trying to outrun the
competition and the cops at triple-digit speeds, the
quality of antialiasing will have less of an
impact on your gaming experience—unless you are
sitting still or driving slowly enough to notice.
When you do, you’ll see just how incredibly good the
game looks. The one thing the e-GeForce 8800 GTX’s
advanced antialiasing and texture filtering can’t
fix, is the poor quality of some of the vinyl kits
for the cars, which use low-res textures.
Prey
A Sci-fi shooter powered by id
Software’s DOOM3 engine featuring
spectacular visuals and gravity-defying combat.
Prey takes
place onboard a huge mothership that is part machine
and part food processor/digestive system, where you
assume the role of Native American hero Tommy trying
to rescue his girlfriend and save the Earth from
becoming a feeding ground for alien invaders.
Patching Prey to Version 1.2
enables native widescreen support. FRAPS was used
for a run-through of the “On the Run” level
at the beginning of the game aboard the alien
vessel, where Tommy has escaped and is trying to
find and rescue his girlfriend.
1920x1200 Hi-Res Screenshots
Click to enlarge
Not only does the DOOM3
engine still have quite a bit of life in it, but it
can also give any current video card a good run for
its money at resolutions over 1600x1200. It wasn’t a
match for the e-GeForce 8800 GTX, though—not
even with the “Ultra” quality setting that was
designed for cards with 512MB RAM. Prey is a
lot more colorful than DOOM3 or Quake 4
(though no less gory). EVGA’s e-GeForce 8800 GTX
really brings the game’s visuals and wild special
effects to life, making it even more of a
spectacular and immersive feast for the eyes at
hi-res, widescreen resolutions. Like F.E.A.R., 16x
CSAA is the maximum playable setting for Prey.
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
Released in March 2006 as the fourth
installment of one of the most popular and
critically acclaimed Role-Playing Game franchises of
all time,
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
has won numerous “Game of The Year” and “Best
RPG” awards. Oblivion features unparalleled
character creation and development, engrossing and
highly addictive gameplay, and a wondrous, living
game world set as the backdrop for a classic tale of
good-against-evil. Its stunning visuals also make it
one of the most punishing games on any
video card.
As I stated earlier, Oblivion
does not permit enabling antialiasing and HDR
lighting simultaneously by default. Only the latest
Radeon cards were able to pull it off by leaving the
default settings of antialiasing disabled and HDR
lighting enabled in the game, and then forcing
antialiasing through the CATALYST control panel with
either the “Chuck” patch or Release 7 CATALYST
drivers installed. It works, the game looks
great—but the performance penalty forces you to dial
back some or most of the game’s visual effects which
makes it look spectacular—especially at higher
resolutions.
The technique for running Oblivion
with antialiasing and HDR lighting at the same time
with GeForce 8800-series cards is similar to the one
used on Radeon cards:
● Leave antialiasing disabled
in Oblivion
● Leave HDR lighting enabled
in Oblivion
● Set the following in the NVIDIA
Control Panel:
Anisotropic filtering:
16x
Antialiasing – Mode:
Override any application setting
Antialiasing – Setting:
4x
Antialiasing – Transparency:
Multisampling
Don’t bother trying to run Coverage
Sampling Antialiasing in Oblivion. It won’t
work—at least not with HDR lighting enabled at the
same time.
There are a number of .INI file
tweaks you can perform to improve Oblivion’s
performance and visual quality, and mods from the
user community that can make the game look
fantastic. Of course, the more you pump-up
Oblivion’s visual quality the more you tax your
video card and frame rates. My Oblivion
installation has a number of these mods and tweaks
that really crank up the visual quality of the game
over an “untweaked” default Oblivion install.
So this should be a good test of the EVGA
e-GeForce 8800 GTX’s pixel and shader-crunching
prowess.
Although Oblivion’s outdoor
levels are more taxing, some indoor levels can also
present a challenge. FRAPS was pressed into duty for
two indoor and outdoor levels:
The Benirus Manor indoor level
uses the
Better Benirus Manor
mod by
Bot Bot.
Not only does it have a better layout, but also
there’s also more lighting and objects to really
push your video card, than the default Benirus
Manor.
The Rosethorn Hall indoor
level uses the
Rosethorn Hall Expanded
mod by
GR-SaLvO.
It adds a new room to the basement of Rosethorn Hall
in Skingrad—large and well lit with a number of
useful enhancements for
Battlemage/Warrior/Adventurer characters like the
ones I typically play in the game. I walked my
character through the entire house, including the
new addition to the basement changing viewpoints and
using a torch in various areas; specifically, the
living room near the fireplace.
Riding a horse through Oblivion’s
outdoor levels in third-person view places the most
strain on a video card. I rode on horseback from
Anvil to Skingrad during the day on the Gold
Road, making a few deviations through the
surrounding terrain to avoid having to stop and deal
with Bandits, Ogres and other enemies. The longer
journey from Bravil to the Imperial City on
horseback took place at night. Due to foggy
conditions, I was forced to use a torch for most of
the trip—both ideal situations for putting more
stress on the video card.
I had all of Oblivion’s visual
settings sliders maxed out (pushed to the right),
with Texture Size set to Large. The
only visual setting wasn’t enabled was Self
Shadows, which never looked good on
any video card. It doesn’t look bad from a
distance, but up close, the “shadows” look
horrible!
I’ve played Oblivion before on
systems with GeForce 7800 and 7900 GTX cards in SLI,
and a Radeon X1900 XT with earlier CATALYST drivers
and the “Chuck” patch and with the latest 7.1
CATALYST drivers, at resolutions from 1600x1200 up
to 1920x1200. I have never been able to play
this game with every visual effect slider set to
maximum without the frame rates going into the
toilet—not even on the SLI systems. Going over 2x
antialiasing on the box with the Radeon X1900 XT
simply wasn’t feasible—or playable. Even with just
2x antialiasing and HDR lighting, I had to drop the
Visual Quality Presets on the Startup Options menu
from High to Medium.
1920x1200 Hi-Res Screenshots
Click to enlarge
Playing Oblivion at 1920x1200
with 4x TR MSAA/16x AF and HDR lighting enabled with
all the visual sliders maxed out and all
those little tweaks in the OBLIVION.INI file and
mods that enhance the game’s visuals even further—is
like playing a whole new game. Stuttering and
lags—gone. Lighting is more luminous and has more
depth. Textures are sharper, clearer and cleaner.
The color is so rich and pure it has a cinematic
quality to it. To say I’m impressed with how
Oblivion plays on the EVGA e-GeForce 8800 GTX
would be an understatement. Not only am I looking
forward to the
Shivering Isles Expansion,
but I’d love to see what a DirectX 10 patch
could do for this game using this card!
