Up front, we have to say that there is no way to turn off vsync in this game. Forcing vsync off with the Radeon or GeForce drivers had no effect.
While EA was nice enough to provide us with testing materials, it wasn't able to give us access to the developers to see if there was a way around the vsync limitation for our benchmarks. Regardless, we will benchmark with a 60 frame per second (FPS) limit cap, and this will reflect exactly the kind of experience that you, the user, will have.
A note about the test system we used for the benchmarks: there is no need to worry that the Q6600 Core 2 Quad CPU overclocked to 2.7 GHz is causing a bottleneck, since our tests showed that this is way more than the game needs to reach its maximum potential. More on that later, though.
We chose a range of graphics cards to test, most of them from our "Best Cards for the Money" monthly recommendations. This gives us a nice, broad spectrum of cards to scrutinize from a range of budgets.
| System Hardware | ||
|---|---|---|
| Processor(s) | Intel Core 2 Duo Q6600 (Kentsfield), 2.7 GHz, FSB-1200, 8 MB Cache | |
| Platform | MSI P7N SLI Platinum Nvidia nForce 750i, BIOS A2 | |
| RAM | A-Data EXTREME DDR2 800+ 2x 2,048 MB, DDR2-800, CL 5-5-5-18 at 1.8 V | |
| Hard Drive | Western Digital Caviar WD50 00AAJS-00YFA, 500 GB, 7200 RPM, 8 MB cache, SATA 3.0 GB/s | |
| Networking | On-Board nForce 750i Gigabit Ethernet | |
| Graphics Cards | Sapphire HD4650 512 MB DDR2 PCIe Gigabyte GV-N96TSL-1GI 1 GB DDR3 PCIe Powercolor AX4830 512 MB DDR3 PCIe Asus ENGTS250 DK 1 GB DDR3 PCIe Asus EAH4850 MT 512 MB DDR3 PCIe ASUS ENGTX260 796 MB DDR3 PCIe | |
| Power Supply | Ultra HE1000X, ATX 2.2, 1000W | |
| Software and Drivers | ||
| Operating System | Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit 6.0.6001, SP1 | |
| DirectX Version | DirectX 10 | |
| Platform Driver | nForce Driver Version 15.25 | |
| Graphics Driver | ATI Catalyst 9.3 Nvidia Forceware 182.08 | |
| Burnout Paradise: The Ultimate Box | Version 1.1, Video Quality: All settings at maximum, Demo: Tom's Custom benchmark and FRAPS |
