Hardware News

Mafia II CPU & GPU Performance Analysis

Patrick "MACMAC" MacMillan

2010-09-07 03:55:31.0


Techgage and TechSpot have both posted a hardware performance analysis of the recently released Mafia II PC game.

Let's see what they had to say:

  • TechSpot:

    "With anti-aliasing disabled along with PhysX, low-end cards such as the GeForce 9600 GT and Radeon HD 5670 were able to deliver playable performance, while Radeon HD 4000 and GeForce 9 series mid-range cards had no problems at all. In that respect Mafia II plays very well on older PC hardware using the high quality visual setting.

    It impressed us that Mafia II was able to fully utilize quad-core processors. Those with mid-range/low-end graphics cards are certainly going to want a quad-core processor for this game. When turning on PhysX we could clearly see that the faster the CPU, the better, simple as that. The more we overclocked the CPU, the more performance a GeForce GTX 480 was able to deliver, so it would appear that Mafia II requires a perfect balance of CPU and GPU power."


    Click here to read the full review.


  • Techgage:

    "For NVIDIA's 400 series of cards, the GTS 250 card gave a nice boost to each. For the GTX 260, however, which isn't a far step up from the GTS 250, the differences are almost not even noticeable. If you happen to have a GTX 260 and a spare card similar to the GTS 250 kicking around, then it's good to put it to use, but you shouldn't go out of your way and purchase one for the purpose... the differences are just too small.

    Hopefully this brief article has helped you in your search for the perfect GPU for your setup, PhysX or not. Please be aware that no matter your GPU, utilizing PhysX is going to hit performance in a rather noticeable way in many portions of the game, so if you are going to take the PhysX route, having a dedicated card is going to be important. You'll lose almost 30 - 40% performance with PhysX enabled, but a dedicated card can give almost half of that back."


    Click here to read the full review.

PhysX is the true performance wild card in this game, you definitely want it definitely if you own an AMD card.

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