by Rob Williams on October 18, 2010 in Graphics & Displays
AMD’s Eyefinity technology has helped gamers over the past year realise that multi-monitor setups are not that unrealistic, and thanks to great support from game developers, more gamers are considering the move. Sapphire, with its Radeon HD 5770 FleX, caters to gamers who do want Eyefinity, but don’t want to go broke in the process.
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.



As much as I consider Mafia II to be a great game, one unfortunate thing is that enabling anti-aliasing does little. For AA benefits to really be seen, 4xAA would be desired, but here, the only option is 2xAA, and in normal gameplay, you’re not going to see differences unless you actually look for them. Even so, the FleX card handles the game relatively well up to 1080p, which for a game that looks this good is fantastic.
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NVIDIA GTX 480 1536MB (Reference)
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2560×1600 – Max Detail, PhysX High, 0xAA
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23
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61.922
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AMD HD 5870 1GB (Sapphire)
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2560×1600 – Max Detail, PhysX Medium, 0xAA
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39
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60.947
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NVIDIA GTX 470 1280MB (EVGA)
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2560×1600 – Max Detail, PhysX Medium, 0xAA
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30
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50.955
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AMD HD 5850 1GB (ASUS)
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2560×1600 – Max Detail, PhysX Medium, 0xAA
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27
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38.468
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NVIDIA GTS 450 1GB (Reference SLI)
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2560×1600 – Max Detail, PhysX Off, 0xAA
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35
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49.230
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AMD HD 5830 1GB (Reference)
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2560×1600 – Max Detail, PhysX Off, 0xAA
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33
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39.252
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NVIDIA GTX 460 1GB (EVGA)
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2560×1600 – Max Detail, PhysX Off, 0xAA
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27
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38.625
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AMD HD 5770 1GB (Sapphire FleX)
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2560×1600 – Medium Shadows, Medium Geometry, SSAO Off, 0xAA
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33
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44.160
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AMD HD 5770 1GB (Reference)
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2560×1600 – Medium Shadows, Medium Geometry, SSAO Off, 0xAA
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30
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44.030
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NVIDIA GTS 450 1GB (ASUS)
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1920×1080 – Max Detail, PhysX Off, 0xAA
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38
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46.118
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AMD HD 5750 1GB (Sapphire)
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1920×1080 – Medium Detail, PhysX Off, 0xAA
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32
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47.660
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Similar to Just Cause 2, we found that lowering the detail settings and going to 2560×1600 was the best option. To pull off that resolution, we had to decrease all levels of detail to Medium, and disable both ambient occlusion and anti-aliasing.
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Mafia II @ 4800×900: Medium Shadows, Medium Geometry, SSAO Off, 0xAA |
Min: 33 / Avg: 40.498 FPS
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To pull the game off in an Eyefinity setup, we had to use identical settings as our 2560×1600 best playable. Like both Dirt 2 and Just Cause 2, Mafia II looks great across three displays, and interestingly enough, it’s one of the few games (or rather, the only I’ve ever seen) that gives a “3 x 1600×900” option rather than “4800×900”. It’s interesting that the developers chose to label the resolution like this, but it’s non-important in the grand scheme.