Need for Speed: Most Wanted on PC Supports Many Graphics Features

Need for Speed: Most Wanted is out at the end of October and developer Criterion Games has confirmed that the game’s PC version comes with support for a variety of graphics options and even for DirectX 11, ensuring a high quality performance, provided you meet the system requirements.

Need for Speed games have delivered some intense racing experiences over the years but, at least on the PC, other titles, like Codemasters’ Dirt ones, have trumped them in terms of graphics.

The upcoming NFS: Most Wanted, however, changes this, as Criterion’s Leanne Loombe has talked with Games.on.net and confirmed that the new game supports DirectX 11 as well as a variety of other features.

“We’re primarily leveraging the increased efficiency of DX11 to give improved performance. The move to DX11 from DX9 has given us around a 300% improvement in rendering performance. This has enabled us to provide an improved image based lighting model over the console version, as well as allowing us to run with higher detail shadows and reflections."

"The increased power of DirectX 11 hardware has also allowed us to implement features such as real-time ambient occlusion, and light scattering algorithms which are absent in the console version,” she said.

Besides DirectX 11, plenty of other features are supported by Most Wanted and can be toggled on and off through a dedicated menu section.

“PC supports a number of advanced graphical features including SSAO, light scattering, high dynamic range motion blur, high resolution textures, advanced specular lighting models, headlight shadow casting, enhanced VFX quality, and enhanced shadow quality levels. We also scale geometry detail and level of detail switching according to screen resolution.”

Considering how powerful modern PCs have become, it’s good to hear that developers are beginning to dedicate more time to their games in order to make them shine on the platform.