Elite Bastards take a look at the performance and image quality of Need For Speed: Carbon Demo on a handful of ATI and NVIDIA boards to see how they stack up. Here's an excerpt:

Looking at our performance numbers, there is no doubt that Need For Speed: Carbon is a step up in its intensity of the GPU compared to its predecessor, Most Wanted, largely due to the performance impact of motion blur upon proceedings.

Despite all that however, we can see that the current ATI high-end boards we tested are more than comfortable with rendering this game at high resolution - 1600x1200 in the Radeon X1950 PRO's case, with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering also thrown into the mix at that resolution on the Radeon X1900 XTX.

The news isn't so good on NVIDIA's side of the coin - For starters, they need to get SLI working via a game profile while also fixing the flickering bug that plagued our abortive attempt to benchmark using a GeForce 7950 GX2. More pressingly however, they need to fix whatever performance issue is holding back the other NVIDIA boards used in our test - Although it may be understandable for them to trail ATI's parts which sport a large number of shader units, there's no way they should be as far behind as they are right now. Hopefully, NVIDIA will have released an updated driver by the time this game ships which fixes these performance issues and makes the game far more playable for user of their GeForce 7 series boards. Until then however, the best advice we can offer is to turn off the motion blur feature (which in all honesty you should probably do anyway, given how distracting it is), which should give you a far more enjoyable gaming experience.