Palit Radeon HD 4870 X2 1GB – AMD Reclaims GPU Supremacy

Note: Each graph throughout our result pages will label the resolution in which the game was run, but omits such data as AA, AF and other graphic-related settings. Select setting information is noted above each set of graphs, but for more a more detailed look, please refer to our testing methodology page, which contains screenshots of each game’s setting pages.

Need for Speed: Pro Street

Electronic Arts is one of the largest game publishers in the world, and because of that, they have plenty of fans and plenty of enemies. Even if you don’t like them, it’s hard to dispute the fact that many of their games are solid, one being anything from the Need for Speed series.

“Pro Street” received rather poor reviews upon launch, and for mostly good reason. It removes the freedom of being able to explore a city at your leisure, which to many, is a huge step backwards. But despite that fact, it’s still a great game if you enjoy the series and want an offering that’s a little more realistic than previous versions (in terms of money and damage).

Our run through consists of racing through two laps at the Chicago Airfield, something that takes about three and a half minutes to accomplish from the moment we begin recording frames. The beginning of each race shows an automated camera fly-by over the cars in the race – we begin recording our FPS as soon as this clip begins.

Settings: Our lowest resolution uses fully default settings, while the 1920 resolution ups the AA to 4x and enables Anisotropic texture filtering.

The HD 4870 X2 continues the domination run here, and not much else can be said. Most of the GPUs seen here performed well, though, except the bottom four (despite the same avg FPS as the 8800 GTX, the 9600 GT stutters). As seen on page three though, where I compared the GTX 280 exclusively to the HD 4870 X2, pushing the graphics options even higher would result in ideal gameplay only on the higher-end cards.

I do wish EA would begin catering to their PC gamer audience though. The lack of 2560×1600 support is nonsense, especially when our GPUs are completely capable of handling the game at that resolution. You could hex-edit the executable to offer the support, but that doesn’t seem like much fun, right? Here’s to hoping they smarten up with the next release, especially since 30″ displays are becoming increasingly affordable.