Zotac GeForce GTX 285 & GTX 295

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.

Sadly, the results are someone inconclusive here, since we again had issues with NVIDIA cards on our Gateway XHD3000 monitor. I won’t explain the entire situation again here, but as I’ve mentioned in previous pieces of content, a select few titles (both that come to mind happen to be EA, although I don’t think it matters) don’t allow the resolution of 2560×1600 when using an NVIDIA card, while it works fine with ATI. I’m currently working with both NVIDIA and Gateway to figure out the true issue… it’s baffling.

Aside from that, our 1920×1200 resolution showed no fault with any card, and I’m led to believe that 2560×1600 would be no different, assuming you can avoid the strange problem I’ve been running into lately. Given that ATI’s cards performed well at that resolution, I’d expect NVIDIA’s cards to be no different, given the scaling with the previous resolutions.

Because we ran into the inability to run this game at 2560×1600 on our particular monitor with NVIDIA cards, we are foregoing listing a “Best Playable” chart, as anything seen above in our graphs definitely fits that bill.