Need for Speed Underground

Need for Speed Underground is the only game we benchmark with that does not support any type of recording or playback features. Since the game is popular and has plenty of eye-catching special effects, we still wanted to benchmark with it. To do this, we played three one lap races on the Olympic Square map in a stock Toyota Celica. FRAPS was used to gather the average FPS throughout each race and the results were averaged for each test. The average FPS recorded for each race does not tend deviate more than 5%.

Because we were actually playing the game and not a recorded demo, there was much more than just graphics performance being analyzed. Besides the graphics, the AI for the cars and traffic, as well as the physics engine stress the CPU and memory as well. Just like the Far Cry benchmarking, this does a better job at evaluating the game's overall performance of the entire system, but this leads to bottlenecks and the performance of the graphics card alone is much harder to see. Even with Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering enabled, the difference in performance between the cards will be limited. Another limiting factor is the fact that NFSU only allows for a maximum resolution of 1280 x 1024.

Need for Speed Underground
(Show All Graphs) (Collapse Graphs)

No AA / No AF

4x AA / 8x AF

ATI Radeon X800 Pro

XFX GeForce 6800 GT

PowerColor Radeon 9800 XT

Leadtek WinFast A380 Ultra

37.81

38.54

37.36

38.14

0

(FPS)

56

 

 

No AA / No AF

4x AA / 8x AF

ATI Radeon X800 Pro

XFX GeForce 6800 GT

PowerColor Radeon 9800 XT

Leadtek WinFast A380 Ultra

36.46

38.46

35.67

36.71

0

(FPS)

56

 

 

All four cards perform so closely here that a comparison is not really necessary. Graphics is obviously not a bottleneck for NFSU. Even at 1024 x 768 with AA and AF disabled (not graphed) the average FPS doesn't exceed 40 FPS. Every card at 1280 x 1024 with 4x AA and 8x AF allows for a good experience.