Awesome Detail

Throw away the gameplay, physics and sound and what are you left with? One very impressive engine! With effects such as high-res textures, fog, realtime animated shadows, solar flares and endless landscapes; NFS5 is a picture of perfection. With graphics like these, who needs real life? The tracks are wide and detailed with trees, huge waterfalls and endless scenery that seem to go on forever. You'd be hard pressed to see the clipping with everything set to max, although you could end up hard pressed to run it.

On our Athlon800 (115Mhz FSB [230Mhz DDR]) with its 256mb PC133 SDRAM and Creative Geforce DDR card, the graphics appear smooth and complete with awesome detail. From the license plate on your car to the distant ship on the sea that slowly chugs by and into the sun set, immaculate all the way. However play it on a P3-450 (100Mhz FSB)/Geforce SDR and 256mb SDRAM PC100 and the story is very different.

NFS5 is an extremely demanding game, if you really want the most out of it then you'll need at least a DDR combined with a 600Mhz P3 or K7, such is the price you pay for quality. Anything below such a system will mean that you'll have to reduce clipping and texture/model detail to quite some extent before the game settles back down.

Other points to note are the lack of weather effects, there doesn't seem to be anything but fog and sun, no rain, thunder, snow or anything of that nature. Something that could so easily have been added but was neglected and thus shortened the life of what can otherwise be a very fun game.

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