AMD Radeon HD 6870 & HD 6850 in CrossFireX

For fans of the original Mafia game, having to wait an incredible eight years for a sequel must’ve been tough. But as we found out in our review, the wait might be forgotten as the game is quite good. It doesn’t feature near as much depth as say, Grand Theft Auto IV, but it does a masterful job of bringing you back to the 1940’s and letting you experience the Mafia lifestyle.

Manual Run-through: Because this game doesn’t allow us to save a game in the middle of a level, we chose to use chapter 7, “In Loving Memory…”, to do our runthrough. That chapter begins us on a street corner with many people around, and from there, we run to our garage, get in our car, and speed out to the street. Our path ultimately leads us to the park, and takes close to two minutes to accomplish.

While Dirt 2 tends to be more Radeon-optimized, Mafia II is GeForce-optimized, and that’s proven here with the GTX 480 creeping up towards the top once again. It manages to surpass the CrossFireX’d HD 6850, but fell far behind the HD 6870 in the same configuration.

NVIDIA’s graphics cards might excel at PhysX acceleration, but thanks to the raw power delivered by AMD’s new cards in CrossFireX mode, we can actually max out the game entirely, including PhysX High. I kept AA disabled because the gained performance is more appreciated than non-noticeable smoothed lines.