ASUS GeForce EN9800GT Matrix

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.

The 9800 GT hasn’t budged at all throughout all our tests, so you definitely know what kind of performance to expect from most any game. Slightly faster than a 9600 GT and slightly slower than an HD 4850. Pretty simple.

This game proves to be the only one in our roundup that’s playable at max detail with every card in our collection. The faster the card, the smoother the gameplay. Though for most people, it might actually be quite difficult to even tell the difference between the lowest and the highest results in real-world gameplay.