EVGA GeForce GTX 285 SSC Edition

The Need for Speed series is one that remains close to my heart, as I’ve been played through each title since the release of the second title. Although the series has taken some strange turns most recently, the series still manages to deliver a great arcade-like experience that can be enjoyed by NFS die-hards and casual gamers alike. Sadly, more serious racing fans have had to look elsewhere lately, so hopefully the next NFS incarnation will finally perfect what fans are really looking for.

While ProStreet diverted from the usual “open-world” design, Undercover returned to it. Also returning are police cars, a favorite of most fans. I’m a firm believer that most NFS titles should include police chases, and for the most part, they’re executed well in Undercover. There’s not too much that exists in this world that proves more frustrating than running over a spike strip after a clean 30-minute run, though.

For all of our tests, the graphics settings available are maxed out to their highest ability, with 4xAA being our chosen Anti-Aliasing setting.

This game in particular must love NVIDIA cards, and the reasons why are evident above. Thanks to the SSC Edition’s high clocks, it managed to dominate each and every graph… even beating out NVIDIA’s own dual-GPU GTX 295 (thanks to some odd unknown (to me) bug).

As mentioned in my previous GPU reviews, our monitor (Gateway XHD3000) has had an issue with 2560×1600 with particular games (Dead Space, NFS: Undercover), so up until now, we’ve been unable to run this game at that resolution, hence the absolute lack of results. NVIDIA last week gave me an alpha driver that fixed the issue, however, which is why I was able to test that resolution here. Our 2560×1600 test here was the only game to be tested with that driver. I decided to use it here only because I could, and to show the differences between this card and the other ATI cards we’ve tested with in the past. Once the driver is deemed stable by NVIDIA, I’ll update the entire graph.