Need for Speed ​​Most Wanted – PC performance graphics benchmarks of Graphics Cards

BASIC GAME INFORMATION

 

Year of construction: 2012
Genre: Arcade / Racing (Cars) / 3D
Platform: PC
developer: Criterion Games
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Publisher in Russia: Electronic Arts

 

Get away from the police and leave your rivals behind! The key to success in Most Wanted is the ability to react quickly and make decisions at lightning speed. The virtual world is open to you – use all the possibilities to hide from your pursuers. Earn new – even more powerful and faster – cars to always be ahead.

Need for Speed: Most Wanted is a crazy race through a huge open city full of both street racers and police officers. At the same time, the updated Autolog makes it easy to track all the actions (races, jumping on trampolines, driving past cameras at high speeds, etc.) of your friends and compare them with your achievements.

The multiplayer mode has been redesigned so that to start the competition you do not need to go to the waiting screens and wait for the arrival, looking at the tables of participants. Now it is enough to simply arrive at the place of the race, and after crossing the finish line, you can turn around and try to ram the laggards.

THE GRAFICAL PART

This subsection of our review highlights the main graphical aspects of this game. Particular attention is paid to the version of the graphics engine used, the version of the API used, graphic settings and the quality of development of the main visual aspects.

Supported OS and graphics API

Need for Speed ​​Most Wanted is supported by the major Windows operating systems, which include Vista and Windows 7, and in the future Windows 8. Other operating systems are not currently supported by the developers. Windows XP is also missing, which has been a trend lately.

The priority and main graphics API for the multiplayer game Need for Speed ​​Most Wanted is DirectX 11, but cards with DirectX 10 on board are also supported by the game. The installed service from EA Origin is required for the game.

Game engine

The game is developed on the RenderWare graphics engine. RenderWare emerged at a time of competition between software graphics rendering on CPUs and hardware rendering on the early GPUs. It competed with other software libraries such as Argonaut Software’s BRender and RenderMorphics’ Reality Lab (Reality Lab was later acquired by Microsoft and became part of Direct3D). RenderWare’s main selling point was to provide a standard graphics programming solution for the sixth generation Sony PlayStation 2 video game console.

Before the second version, the engine needed to use external programming and scripting languages. RenderWare 2 introduced its own internal scripting language RWX (RenderWare script), in the next version – RenderWare 3 – RWX support was removed. In RenderWare 4, the developers focused on a file format with a binary structure. In 2003, Criterion acquired MathEngine, the developer of the Karma physics engine. Karma’s developments formed the basis of RenderWare Physics, one of the components of the engine responsible for the physical model.

In 2004, Criterion Games, which developed RenderWare, was acquired by Electronic Arts and became its subsidiary; As a result of the deal, the rights to the RenderWare engine were also acquired. Before developer Criterion was bought out by Electronic Arts, the technology was in great demand among third-party developers. It was assumed that after the company was purchased, the engine would be offered for licensing to third parties, but some customers decided that it would be too risky to rely on a product that was owned by their main competitor. For example, Rockstar Games, whose previous games were built on RenderWare, began using Gamebryo (for Bully: Scholarship Edition, 2008), as well as its own RAGE in new projects of the time (for example, Grand Theft Auto 4). Midway Games, which often used RenderWare in development, standardized on the Unreal Engine 3 for itself and its internal studios – games of the time, Stranglehold, Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe and The Wheelman were built on this technology. Some time later, Electronic Arts removed RenderWare from sale, making it available only to its subsidiary studios.

 

However, the new owner of the technology, Electronic Arts, still maintains the old contracts and agreements. Those developers who licensed RenderWare before purchasing Criterion can continue to use the engine in their project (or series of games, if such a license was purchased). Bing Gordon, EA’s chief executive, said in an interview with Gamasutra that RenderWare “is no longer a good engine for next-gen consoles and RenderWare can’t compete with Unreal Engine,” which is why “Electronic Arts has stopped using it in their projects.” However, this statement doesn’t square with the fact that some of the company’s recent games, such as The Sims 3, are built on RenderWare.

 

Criterion Games continues to develop technology and create new internal versions of the engine. The latest versions of the engine were used to create the games Burnout Paradise and Criterion’s 2010 Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit, as well as a number of games from other EA divisions, including Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. RenderWare is an integrated software package – a game engine that combines all the necessary components for developing three-dimensional applications: a graphics engine, a physics engine, a sound engine, an artificial intelligence system, etc. Additionally, it provides developers with a multi-platform application programming interface. The source code is written in the C++ programming language.

 

Many games using the RenderWare engine (for example, the Grand Theft Auto series, Bully (PS2), The Sims 3, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) make extensive use of the engine’s capabilities for working with very large, detailed locations. A very large area map can be loaded on the fly, with virtually no need for the player to wait or display a loading screen. Technically, locations are usually divided into sections that are loaded gradually. To save RAM, the LOD method can be used (when an object is far from the player’s visibility, its highly detailed model is smoothly replaced by a model with lower detail and texture size – thus the engine saves the player’s system resources). Also implemented is mip-mapping (MIP-texturing) – another optimization technique, but relating only to textures.

 

The graphics engine (the component responsible for processing graphics) supports both static (pre-drawn) and soft dynamic shadows, which can be influenced by the location of light sources. Per-vertex lighting and light maps can be used for lighting. Implemented relief texturing and work with high-resolution textures; working with vertex and pixel shaders, frame-by-frame and skeletal animation of characters, a developed particle system, special effects for water and sky (including using shaders).

 

The graphics engine also supports a wide range of post-processing effects, for example: motion blur, bloom, High Dynamic Range Rendering, depth of field, etc. The physics engine, commonly called RenderWare Physics, is based on the Karma physics engine. It provides basic physics, collision detection, rag doll physics, vehicle physics. The sound engine provides three-dimensional Dolby Surround sound. The RenderWare game engine has many internal versions (for example, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City 2003 was based on version 3.x, and the engine version from Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (2010) and Need for Speed : Most Wanted (2012) is called Chameleon), but mostly information about the versions of the engine used in the games is not reported anywhere. The RenderWare engine is constantly being refined and improved within the development company.

Advanced Game Settings

Need for Speed ​​Most Wanted has a very wide range of graphic settings. We can flexibly manipulate various graphic settings, setting them to low, medium, high and maximum quality levels. 

 

Below we have provided screenshots of the game at various graphics settings, where our readers can see the difference between the minimum, medium, and maximum graphics quality settings. 

Low quality settings

Medium quality settings

High quality settings

Maximum quality settings

As we can see, the difference between the different graphics is quite significant.

General visual design and game physics

As we can remember, not so long ago, namely the year before last, Criterion Games released Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (2010). The game at that time had a very nice picture, but, alas, I couldn’t call it technologically advanced. To a greater extent this was caused by the console porting. And PC owners got leftovers from the master’s table of consoles.

 

This year the situation is completely different – the developers of Need for Speed ​​Most Wanted paid more attention to PC owners and, to their delight, a game was released that was significantly better graphically than on consoles, plus supporting the latest graphics technologies. Among the main graphics features, it is worth noting the DirectX 11 functions and high-resolution textures.

 

The physics of destruction in the game has cosmetic value and does not affect the behavior of the car during accidents in any way. The controls are more tailored to the gamepad and for comfortable playability on standard PC accessories you will have to adjust it to suit yourself.

Next, we will move directly to gaming tests and determine what impact this game has on modern computer hardware.

TEST PART

GPU test

All video cards were tested at maximum graphics quality by the program MSI Afterburner. The purpose of the test is to determine how video cards from different manufacturers behave under the same conditions. The average FPS was taken as a performance indicator. Below is a video of the test segment:  

Our video cards were tested at different screen sizes of 1680×1050, 1920×1080 and 2560×1600 at the maximum graphics quality settings allowed by Need for Speed ​​Most Wanted. Multi-chip configurations from NVIDIA and AMD are currently not supported by the game. The game has an internal FPS limit of 60 frames.

 

Testing at maximum quality settings 1680×1050 

 

 At a resolution of 1680×1050 at maximum settings, video cards of the Radeon HD 7750 or GeForce GTX 550 Ti level showed an acceptable FPS. The optimal video cards will be Radeon HD 7770 or GeForce GTX 460 and above.

Testing at maximum quality settings 1920×1080 

 

At a resolution of 1920×1080 at maximum settings, an acceptable FPS indicator was shown by video cards of the Radeon HD 5830 level or GeForce GTX 460. The optimal video cards will be Radeon HD 5850 or GeForce GTX 470 and higher.

Testing at maximum quality settings 2560×1600

 

At a resolution of 2560×1600 at maximum settings, an acceptable minimum FPS was shown by video cards of the Radeon HD 6950 level or GeForce GTX 480. The optimal video cards will be Radeon HD 7870 or GeForce GTX 660 Ti and higher. 

We ask our users to apologize for the absence of 79XX series cards in the tests, we have encountered some problems and their results will be added in a few days.

VRAM test

Testing of video memory consumed by the game was carried out by the program MSI Afterburner. The indicator was based on results on top video cards from AMD and NVIDIA with separate screen sizes 1680×1050, 1920×1080 and 2560×1600.

Testing at maximum memory GPU quality settings 

 

The recommended amount of video memory for this game is 1.2 GB for basic graphics quality settings. For ultra resolutions and maximum settings, you will need about 1.5 gigabytes of video memory.

CPU test

 

We tested processor dependence on 12 models of basic configurations that are relevant today. The test was carried out in those places where the value of video cards for the game is minimal and its load was less than 99%, this time at a resolution of 1920×1080 with maximum graphics quality settings. Below is a video of the test segment:  

Testing at minimum quality settings 1920×1080

 

Need for Speed ​​Most Wanted has rather dubious optimization in terms of processor dependence. The game clearly does not have enough two cores, and the game simply cannot fully use four cores…

RAM test

Testing of the RAM consumed by the game was carried out by monitoring directly through the Windows task manager. The test was carried out on the basic configuration of Core i 7 [email protected] GHz with 8GB DDR3 2400 MGz pre-installed memory.

Testing at various quality settings

 

As we can see, with various basic quality settings, the amount of RAM consumed in Need for Speed ​​Most Wanted is at the level of 900 megabytes. Thus, for a comfortable game you need to have at least 2 GB of RAM installed in your PC. 

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