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Burnout Paradise: The Ultimate Box

Visuals, Performance

Burnout Paradise has received a fresh coat of paint when moving to the PC from the Xbox 360. Textures are detailed and everything looks excellent even at high resolutions. Widescreen support is perfect and the game even has multi-monitor support, including support for Matrox TripleHead for massively wide gaming.

Low settings - smooth on YouGamers minimum system.	Medium setting adds in dynamic shadows.
High Settings - smooth on YouGamers recommended setup.	High settings with SSAO enabled.

You'll find plenty of visual options to adjust the performance, but gameplay dictates the need to run the game at absolutely solid 60fps and that does set the practical minimum a bit higher than what the box says. I admit that you can play the game at the publisher's minimum level, but there is no way to reach smooth, solid 60fps with it - and it really really sucks to crash out a tight race simply because the framerate dipped for a bit. The YouGamers minimum gives you that smooth framerate with low or medium settings (depending on your resolution) while the recommended setup gives you smooth 60fps at maximum settings while keeping SSAO disabled.

SSAO disabled.

SSAO enabled. Differences are minor, and the framerate loss isn't worth it.

SSAO or Screen Space Ambient Occulsion does improve the visuals slightly, but in practice it's there for those who own high end SLI setups - on a single GeForce GTX285 at 1600x1200 and otherwise maxed out settings the framerate dips from absolutely solid 60fps to about 40fps - in my opinion, an unacceptable tradeoff for the gameplay of Burnout Paradise.

In-game advertising

Criterion has been in the forefront of in-game advertising and they made the headlines during the 2008 presidential campaign as ads promoting President Barack Obama showed up in the Xbox 360 version of Burnout Paradise. PC version also includes the controversial in-game advertising system but at least so far the ads have looked acceptable to me. Ads for Burger King or Diesel fit the scenery perfectly and while the NVIDIA and EVGA billboards do stand out a bit, it doesn't get distracting as the actual billboards fit the game and the scenery.

There has been some annoying in-game ads in the past, but if the style Burnout Paradise uses is "the future" and it helps the developers to fund ongoing development of additional content, I don't see the problem. The key is to ensure that the advertising fits the game and doesn't break immersion.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: GameplayPage 3: Visuals and PerformancePage 4: Summary, Scores

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