NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580

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.

NVIDIA’s GTX 580 struts its stuff here, only being surpassed by AMD’s powerful dual-GPU offerings. The gains compared to the GTX 480 are not quite as high as I’d expect, but are still notable.

The GTX 580 can handle Mafia II at top-end settings, even with anti-aliasing high, so that becomes our best playable. Surprisingly, despite having no PhysX acceleration, the HD 5970 still manages to surpass the performance of NVIDIA’s latest card.