Mafia II
Mafia II is a third-person action-adventure video game which is the sequel to Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven. It is developed by 2K Czech and is published by 2K Games and was released last month. Mafia II is set from 1943 to 1951 in Empire Bay which is a fictional city based mostly on San Francisco and New York City along with some influences from Chicago and also Detroit. Mafia II is a gritty drama which chronicles the rise of World War II veteran Vito Scaletta who joins the Falcone Crime Family and becomes a ‘made’ man. There are 15 chapters in the game and over two hours of game engine generated cutscenes.
Mafia II makes extensive use of Nvidia’s PhysX whose full effects are seen smoothly only by playing on a PhysX-enabled GeForce and preferably with a second video card dedicated to it. For this article, we used the full retail game with Mafia II’s built-in benchmark with the highest settings for 1920×1200 and 1680×1050 – without PhysX except as noted – and this time we will reserve comment until after both charts. Playing at 2560×1600 is difficult without substantially lowering the settings that we love to test at.
Now at 1680×1050:
The HD 6970 is the fastest followed by the GTX 580 then the HD 6950 while the HD 5870 edges the GTX 570 which in turn edges the GTX 480, followed by the overclocked GTX 460 and then the HD 6870. All of our video cards except for the stock GTX 460s will give a satisfactory playing experience despite the benchmark’s suggestion that the framerates drop too low. However, enabling AA and high PhysX together will bring a GTX 580 to its knees even at 1920×1200 although medium PhysX settings are quite playable. You cannot enable PhyX on a Radeon without incurring a heavy performance penalty.
This covers our DX9 games; let’s move on to DX10 and DX11 games.