Madden NFL 08
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Publisher: Electronic Arts™ Genre(s): Sports / Racing Home Page: http://www.madden08.com
Vintage visualsWhile Madden NFL looked absolutely amazing on the PS2 back in 2001, and even though it's received some further visual refinement for the next two yearly releases, at some point the engine development all but ceased. The PC build has been tied to the PS2 and GameCube versions for many years, and the engine used on the PC has not aged well. All 2D graphical elements are still drawn only to one resolution and while that got upgraded from the PS2-grade 640x480 to 800x600 (last year, if I recall right), it doesn't exactly match with today's most common resolution of 1280x1024 (or more). While the game supports higher resolutions and now has the support for such common PC widescreen resolutions as 1680x1050 for all the 3D graphics, the "intended" play resolution is still 800x600. At higher resolutions, you get the mismatch of sharp and detailed players overlaid by low resolution 2D elements such as the button icons and playbook menus. EA apparently has not received the memo about the new tech breakthrough called "resolution-independent user interface".
At its best, Madden 08 looks acceptable, but you have to use the instant replay to set up such beauty shots.
The same low resolution graphics turn the career and manager play modes into an exercise in frustration. While the UI does allow the use of mouse, it's painfully clear it's made for standard-definition TVs and joypads, which is not the combination usually used for serious sports manager games. During actual play, the 3D graphics are passable, and most of the textures can be bumped up to a fairly high resolution - far beyond what's used on the PS2. As the engine is DX8-based and uses hardly any pixel shaders, it's completely unlike the new shiny engine used on the Xbox 360 and PS3. The minimum supported card is a NVIDIA GeForce 3 or ATI Radeon 8500, and while that was fine three years ago, these days that indicates a museum-grade graphics engine. PerformanceAs the visuals range from poor to marginally passable, it's not much of a shock to find out that the game actually plays fine on a setup almost as poor as the box claims as the minimum.
Yes, even the NVIDIA GeForce 3 Ti500 that we used to find out the practical minimum manages to run the game at quite playable frame rates at the suggested 800x600 resolution - with the disclaimer that the CPU recommendation is a bit optimistic. If absolute smoothness is critical, you can turn the textures to a low-resolution mess, but even a 6 years old graphics card can maintain 30fps+ with acceptable visual quality - impressive, considering the age of the hardware.
Our recommended setup, with an ATI Radeon X1300 or NVIDIA GeForce 6600, allows you to bump the visuals very close to the maximum. It's pretty indicative of the game that just about any card you can still buy from a shop runs the game at nearly maximized settings at 1280x1024 resolution. One of our main test rigs with an ATI Radeon HD 2900XT unsurprisingly ran the game at rock solid 60fps regardless of the resolution used, and the only way to get down to any drops under 60fps was to bump up the antialiasing at very high resolutions. In summary, as long as you have T&L support, and the CPU is a Pentium 4 or Athlon XP, the game will run acceptably well, with today's midrange systems running the game happily at maxed out settings, often with plenty of performance to spare. While 256MB RAM is theoretically enough, to avoid constant disk access the practical minimum is 512MB (and as seems common, add another 512MB to that for extra shiny desktop features if you happen to use Vista)
Related Stuff Games: Madden NFL 08
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ATI Radeon X1300
