GeForce GTX 470 & 480 review - VGA performance: Just Cause 2

VGA performance: Just Cause 2

Using Windows XP? Forget about this title. Just Cause 2 will be using DirectX 10 features instead. And since Windows XP directly comes with DirectX 9, this will not fly with the game. Your only remedy, therefore, is to install either Vista or Windows 7. Something about tethering cars to explosive barrels or poles gives us the impression that Just Cause 2 might run like trash on older PCs. But chances are you don't have an older PC, Mr-Shiny-New-PC-reader. Square Enix announced that Just Cause 2 will support NVIDIA's CUDA tech. It will also support 3D.

JC2 is a story all by itself. NVIDIA cards will have extra options in image quality. In fact I expect quite a number of reviews out today with improper benchmark results as for NVIDIA graphics cards additional features like Bokeh filters and GPU Water Simulation are enabled at default.

Comparing this title to the Radeon graphics cards requires these function to be disabled if you want to benchmark objectively, which we did. The results are amazing, what an incredible title JC2 is, and through DX 10.1 how extremely nice looking the game is.

We have 8xAA and 16xAF enabled in these tests.

Once we enable (++) the NVIDIA CUDA specific eye-candy (Bokeh filter and GPU Water Simulation) We can clearly see a massive drop in performance. Still extremely playable though!

But let us look at the GeForce GTX 480.

Very impressive, and the GTX 480 card... well just look at the little fucker go. Massive... seriously massive performance there.

And once more, once we've enabled (++) the NVIDIA CUDA specific eye-candy (Bokeh filter and GPU Water Simulation). With a GeForce GTX 480 you can easily flick on everything you want. Again, we measure with 8xAA and 16xAF activated.

And last but not least, a couple of the latest available high-end cards compared. Before you wonder, that R5970 had an issue alright, multi-GPU clearly did not kick in.