Closing Thoughts

As you will have figured out by now, the purpose of this article is non to play the game and tell you guys how much nosotros did or didn't like information technology. Rather we aimed to provide a huge amount of information to show how well this game runs on a varied array of hardware and different quality settings.

The master focus of this game, at least from a hardware perspective, has to be its implementation of Nvidia PhysX. Playing through a few levels of Mafia II while enabling and disabling PhysX we found that the effects visually improve some select scenes, making them more realistic, merely for the nearly function they do piddling to raise the game itself. Although I am a sucker for eye candy, it is hard non to feel like you are not getting plenty of it based on the functioning hit.

The loftier-end GeForce GTX 480 is more than capable of playing this game in all of its glory at resolutions every bit loftier as 2560x1600 with PhysX enabled, and then it is non the $500+ graphics cards we are concerned with. Fifty-fifty the more affordable GeForce GTX 460 tin handle PhysX at resolutions such as 1680x1050 or lower when coupled with a fast enough processor.

Every bit mentioned before, the born benchmark represents a worst case scenario then you lot can expect to add a few more frames per second on a regular playing scenario. Also, for those wondering why we didn't test PhysX prepare to medium rather than only high, it was because in that location was well-nigh no performance deviation betwixt the ii, then we decided to stick with high.

Sadly for those with AMD graphics cards playing Mafia Two with PhysX enabled is not going to run very well, unless you have a Nvidia graphics card handling the PhysX workload. Even with our Core i7 920 processor clocked at iii.70GHz, the Radeon Hard disk 5970 and 5870 cards were limited to 22fps at 1680x1050. With a defended Nvidia PhysX card even the old Radeon HD 4890 tin can provide playable performance at 1680x1050, yet factoring in the cost of the boosted graphics card this path makes petty sense. The best option for AMD users is to disable PhysX and forget it even exists. Nosotros doubtable almost volition go over the missing rubble.

While we would not normally recommend disabling anti-aliasing in games that support it, we must admit this feature fabricated little divergence in Mafia II. Owners of speedy GPUs won't feel the need to plow it off, just to give you tangible examples, the Radeon Hard disk 4850 was an incredible 78% faster with anti-aliasing disabled while the GeForce 9800 GT was also 52% faster.

With anti-aliasing disabled along with PhysX, low-terminate cards such as the GeForce 9600 GT and Radeon Hard disk 5670 were able to evangelize playable operation, 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 desire a quad-core processor for this game. When turning on PhysX we could conspicuously run across that the faster the CPU, the meliorate, simple as that. The more than we overclocked the CPU, the more performance a GeForce GTX 480 was able to deliver, so it would appear that Mafia 2 requires a perfect balance of CPU and GPU power.