New Need For Speed: Shift Patch Boosts AMD GPU Performance

Need For Speed: Shift

Need for Speed: Shift is the 13th installment of the long-running racing video game franchise Need for Speed published by Electronic Arts. The game features 72 fully-licensed cars, ranging from classic cars to modern sport cars. The game was in development for two years before it was released and the graphics look great.

All in game settings were set to their maximum. We used 8xAA and 16xAF for all of our performance tests in Need for Speed: Shift.

Benchmark Results: EA said that the new game patch increases ATI graphics card support in general and we confirmed that as well by noting a 26% performance increase by updating the game and installing the latest beta driver by ATI. For those lucky enough to be running a CrossFire multi-GPU setup we found that Need For Speed: Shift scaled 16% with the current drivers and game patch, but with the new drivers and game patch ATI CrossFire scaling increased to 46%. This is a frame rate improvement of 59% from where we started! As you can see the driver update from ATI and the new patch by EA has greatly improved multi-GPU performance. We also tried out the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 multi-GPU graphics card and found that we got a 24% performance boost when going from SLI to Quad-SLI. Even with four GPUs the pair of GeForce GTX 295 graphics cards in Quad-SLI wasn’t enough to keep up with a pair of Radeon HD 5870 graphics cards.

We did notice that the new game patch created a couple of image quality issues on the Radeon HD 5800 series that were not present on previous versions of Need For Speed: Shift, though. As you can see above, with the latest patch both CATALYST 9.10 and 8.663.1 beta 4 drivers had issues rendering smoke. We contacted ATI to report the issue and they confirmed what we were seeing. ATI said that a fix for this will be easy to make and are actually making the driver fixes right now, so this bug that LR found should be taken care of well before the drivers ever get made public. Obviously, this will impact the performance numbers and this is the reason why we are pointing it out to our readers.

Once EA releases the game patch that we tried here in its alpha stages and AMD releases their next driver the players of Need For Speed: Shift that own ATI graphics cards will see a nice boost in gaming performance. In our opinion this is all a couple of months late, but it is better late than never as many would say.