ASUS EN9800GTX+ 512MB Dark Knight

Where the racing genre is concerned, there are few games like Need for Speed. The first title launched in 1994, and since then, the series has done well to stick to its roots by offering an exciting racing experience that doesn’t hinge on being a simulator, like Gran Turismo or Forza. Instead, it delivers close to an arcade-like experience, which seems to be preferred by most people. EA has also kept incredibly regular with the series, having released sixteen different versions in a fourteen year span. That’s impressive.

What wasn’t impressive was ProStreet, however, as it took the franchise and turned it upside down. Sometimes reinventing a series is a good thing, but with concern to this game, EA should have left things as they were. The developers realized they goofed though, and the upcoming Undercover game (slated for a Nov. 17 release) looks to bring the series back on track. On release, we’ll replace ProStreet with Undercover in our testing.

ProStreet offers a wide-range of graphics options, allowing you to intricately tweak the game to work on your machine, regardless of what hardware you have. However, even when using maxed out detail settings, the game is still playable enough to complete a reliable benchmarking run, so we take that route. We also enable anisotropic filtering and 4x anti-aliasing.

In most of our gaming tests, the 9800 GTX+ didn’t make significant leaps in performance, but ProStreet did show a ~4.5FPS increase in both resolutions… nice to see.

Since ProStreet tops out at 1920×1200, which happens to be far less intensive than 2560×1600, all GPUs in our lineup could run the game fine with our topped-out settings. The 9800 GTX+ had no problem running the game with maxed out settings, which to me means we really need Undercover to hurry up and get released. We desperately need 2560×1600 in Need for Speed!