Mafia Two is a tertiary-person action shooter that combines Grand Theft Auto-like gameplay mechanics with a world heavily inspired by the archetype films Godfather and Goodfellas. Non coincidentally the protagonist is a soon to be fabricated-man chosen Vito. The game is a direct sequel to Mafia: The Metropolis of Lost Sky released in 2002 having received by and large positive reactions from critics and gamers alike.

Developed by the aforementioned squad as the original (2K Czech, formerly Illusion Softworks), Mafia II was released for the Windows platform last August 24th. The game also received simultaneous launches for the PS3 and Xbox 360, but in spite of this the visual quality of the PC version does not suffer from the "crappy console port" syndrome. Rather Mafia Ii looks to be one of the best games of 2022 to show off the capabilities of current generation high-stop GPUs.

We will tell you upfront we are somewhat skeptical about seeing a fair fight between ATI and Nvidia GPUs when testing this game. Nvidia took a close interest in Mafia 2 and as a event exclusive features such as PhysX, 3D Vision and Surround gaming take been worked into the game. While not a bad thing at all, it means the game is likely optimized to perform at its best with Nvidia GPUs.

Out of those three Nvidia exclusive features we are almost interested in PhysX, which is meant to add together a new layer of realism to action sequences (check out the video below). Mafia II features Nvidia's Noon which is a scalable dynamics framework that provides artists with easy to utilize authoring tools to take reward of PhysX. Apex supports a number of modules that include destruction, vegetation, particles, clothing and turbulence. As far every bit nosotros can tell Mafia 2 only uses the wear and particles modules.

To date very few games have adopted PhysX and nosotros believe Noon is Nvidia'south try to assistance increment the number of titles that take reward of it.

Interestingly, Mafia 2 only includes back up for DirectX 9. Despite all the talk behind DirectX eleven, 2K Czech has played it safety and stuck with the tried and true DX9 rendering mode to push button this game'southward impressive visuals. The Illusion engine was specifically written for Mafia II, with some saying it rivals the CryEngine 2 game engine (Crysis Warhead). That said, fifty-fifty the well-nigh meticulous of gamers have a hard time spotting a difference between Crysis running in the DX9 and DX10 modes.

And so with a new total version copy of Mafia Two loaded onto our exam system and two dozen graphics cards lined upwards gear up to test, we set about to deliver some other GPU & CPU performance article. Not only take we tested a huge range of graphics cards, simply we will also wait at the impact PhysX has on performance with and without a dedicated card. Every bit usual, we'll also have a quick wait at CPU scaling performance for those concerned if they have the necessary guts on that front as well.