Mafia II GPU & CPU Performance In-depth

how do the consoles handle this game?? Most high-end cards (and some mid-range cards) are much more powerful than ps3 or xbox 360, and some cards struggle to deliver playable performance with this game.

The consoles have much lower detail, no AA, and little physx

Be prepared to make the same short post next time we do a game performance article. We do not have a GeForce GTX 465 graphics card and we don’t really want one, plus no one will send us a card as they don’t want their name associated with a bad product. There was never any point to the card and with the GTX 460 out and about there is definitely no point to it now.

On a side note how is it that no one can work out where a card such as the GeForce GTX 465 should be positioned in terms of performance despite having 23 other graphics cards to work with. I mean you know how fast the GeForce GTX 470 was, you know how fast the GeForce GTX 460 was so… connect the dots it’s the same architecture.

I agree testing the dedicated PhysX performance of different Nvidia cards would have been ideal. However I had to decide between doing that or showing how all the graphics cards perform with a dedicated card. With the results you see in the review I ran the in-game benchmark well over 600 times to get those results, which is a few days of solid testing.

I am just curious why so many times? were there a lot of variations in the runs?

There were 245 unique tests, each must be run three times to take the average. Otherwise it is likely you will end up with quite a few inaccurate results. So really its over 700+ tests but that is still well over 600

Opps! I missed the 245 different test part Thanks

I bet you are sick of rubble.

Yeah I am over it mate Its cool the first few times but before long you don't even notice it!

HAHA! well done Steve! I don't think I could ever look at a game test over 100 times let alone well over 700+ times,

Thats dedication right there!

I bet he was mumbling 'not again goomba' in his sleep that night.

There seems to be an issue on this game where the PhysX particles are on the GPU but cloth is still being processed on CPU even if you have a dedicated card for it, so that can cause quite a big slowdown. On my system, PhysX turns itself off after about 30 mins or so of playing anyway.
I hope these issues get patched soon....

Why not any X6 CPU?

Give me one and I will add it. AMD have a sample shortage and we had to send ours back...

A huge chunk of PhysX (cloth) is being processed on CPU in all scenarios: http://physxinfo.com/news/3892/mafia-ii-is-not-using-gpu-for-physx-cloth-simulation/
That's why CPU powee is critical if you want to play with PhysX enabled.

I wish techspot would had included an Athlon II CPU for budget-minded gamers like me. Also for the sake of determining the performance gain by the inclusion of L3 cache.