The Games of Christmas '08: GPU Performance Part II

Need for Speed Undercover: GPU Performance

Benchmarking NFS: Undercover proved to be an interesting process but we finally decided on the Ocean and Wilson Circuit race for a worst case scenario benchmark run. The benchmark run involves running 4 laps of the circuit at the hardest difficulty setting with 7 other racers and a high traffic volume. The total amount of time usually ranged between 3:30 and 3:40 of gameplay time recorded in FRAPS.

1440 X 900



1680 X 1050


Unfortunately for the results it seems like somehow Undercover is largely CPU bound until AA is turned on. At that point, ATI’s lead over the Nvidia cards grows quite a bit. We have been told by Nvidia that optimizations for this game will be coming soon but until then, this is all she wrote folks.

One thing I do want to point as being clearly illustrated is the fact that there is a massive performance difference between cards which are quite close in price. A mere $20 - $30 separates the HD 4670 from the HD 4650 and about $30 is all that stands between the 9500 GT 512MB GDDR3 and 9600 GSO . Keep that in mind when looking at these results.