Mafia II is a third-person activeness shooter that combines Grand Theft Car-like gameplay mechanics with a world heavily inspired by the classic films Godfather and Goodfellas. Not coincidentally the protagonist is a soon to be fabricated-human called Vito. The game is a direct sequel to Mafia: The City of Lost Sky released in 2002 having received by and large positive reactions from critics and gamers alike.

Adult by the same team as the original (2K Czech, formerly Illusion Softworks), Mafia Two was released for the Windows platform last August 24th. The game likewise received simultaneous launches for the PS3 and Xbox 360, only in spite of this the visual quality of the PC version does non endure from the "crappy console port" syndrome. Rather Mafia II looks to be ane of the all-time games of 2010 to testify off the capabilities of current generation high-terminate GPUs.

Nosotros will tell you lot 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 II and as a event sectional features such equally PhysX, 3D Vision and Environment gaming have been worked into the game. While non a bad thing at all, information technology means the game is likely optimized to perform at its best with Nvidia GPUs.

Out of those three Nvidia exclusive features nosotros are well-nigh interested in PhysX, which is meant to add a new layer of realism to action sequences (check out the video below). Mafia II features Nvidia'southward Noon which is a scalable dynamics framework that provides artists with like shooting fish in a barrel to use authoring tools to take reward of PhysX. APEX supports a number of modules that include destruction, vegetation, particles, clothing and turbulence. As far as we can tell Mafia Two only uses the article of clothing and particles modules.

To date very few games have adopted PhysX and we believe APEX is Nvidia'southward effort to help increase the number of titles that take advantage of it.

Interestingly, Mafia Ii merely includes back up for DirectX 9. Despite all the talk behind DirectX 11, 2K Czech has played information technology safe and stuck with the tried and true DX9 rendering style to push button this game'due south impressive visuals. The Illusion engine was specifically written for Mafia 2, with some saying information technology rivals the CryEngine ii game engine (Crysis Warhead). That said, fifty-fifty the most meticulous of gamers have a hard fourth dimension spotting a difference between Crysis running in the DX9 and DX10 modes.

So with a new full version re-create of Mafia Ii loaded onto our test system and two dozen graphics cards lined upward gear up to exam, we ready about to deliver another GPU & CPU performance article. Not but have nosotros tested a huge range of graphics cards, but we will also expect at the impact PhysX has on performance with and without a defended card. As usual, we'll also take a quick look at CPU scaling operation for those concerned if they have the necessary guts on that front besides.