Gamincs Blog

So you've watched movies like The Godfather, Goodfellas, Casino and Donnie Brasco, and you think you're ready for life in the mob? There's a safe and perfectly legal way to find out: play Mafia 2. The long-awaited sequel to one of the finest games ever to grace the PC (Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven), Mafia 2 lets you live 'the life' as Vito Scaletta, experiencing all the highs and lows of being a gangster in mid-century America. With over 120 songs from the 1940s-60s, over 30 classic vehicles from that era, and a large and fully detailed city, Mafia 2 will have you hooked from the moment you step into Vito's shoes.

The game's official minimum requirements are shown below:

Processor: Pentium D 3Ghz or AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600+ (Dual core)
Memory: 1.5 GB
Hard Drive: At least 8 GB of free space
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 8600 (or equivalent) or higher
Sound Card: DirectX 9.0c compatible
Peripherals: Keyboard & mouse or Windows compatible gamepad
OS: Windows XP SP2 / Vista / 7
This means that virtually any gaming PC can play Mafia 2. However the game has an added PC-exclusive feature in the form of NVIDIA PhysX enhancements. To utilize these enhanced features at playable framerates the following is recommended as a minimum:

Processor: 2.4 GHz Quad Core
Memory: 2 GB
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260
GPU driver: 197.13 or newer
NVIDIA PhysX driver: 9.10.0513 or newer
We'll take a more detailed look at the PhysX/APEX enhancements later in this guide.

What follows are full descriptions for all of Mafia 2's in-game settings, including screenshot comparisons to highlight the impact on image quality of changing the various settings. Performance information is also provided for every setting, although bear in mind that the precise impact on your particular system depends on your specific hardware combination and your other game and system-wide settings. The aim here is to give you enough information so that you can make an informed choice as to the settings you enable or disable to obtain the precise balance of visual quality and performance which is acceptable to you.

General System Optimization

Almost as important as any in-game setting is the way your Windows installation is configured. A great many problems and performance issues can be traced directly to sub-optimal settings in Windows and out-of-date or badly configured drivers. For this reason it is recommended that you download the relevant version of the TweakGuides Tweaking Companion (TGTC) and take the time to optimize your Windows installation correctly. At the very least make sure to update your graphics drivers to the latest available version.

Performance Measurement

To successfully conduct any tweaking in Mafia 2, you will need some way of objectively measuring your performance in Frames Per Second (FPS). Fortunately, Mafia 2 comes with a built-in benchmark which provides a consistent measure of performance across all systems. To access the benchmark, launch Mafia 2, click Extras on the main menu, then select the Benchmark option. The benchmark will run through a set sequence of events using your current game settings, arriving at an average FPS figure for your system. While the Mafia 2 benchmark is very useful for objective performance measurement, in practice it provides a worst-case scenario, in that during actual gameplay, even at the highest settings, your FPS will rarely be as low as those shown in the benchmark sequence. Importantly, you should also run the benchmark at least twice, because during the first run frequent loading pauses may reduce your FPS, whereas the second run should be relatively free of these pauses and will give you a more accurate result.

To observe your FPS at any point in the game, use the free FRAPS utility. Download, install and launch FRAPS before starting up Mafia 2 You will now see a yellow FPS counter displayed in the corner of your screen. Pay attention to the FPS figure, particularly during graphically intense scenes, such as during explosions and in crowded areas - if it dips into the low double or single digits for example, this is a good indication that you need to adjust various settings until your minimum FPS is consistently above 20-25.

Source: http://www.geforce.com/optimize/guides/mafia-2-tweak-guide/#1