Denuvo as a buzzkill?
Unfortunately, EA couldn’t bring themselves to abandon Denuvo as copy protection. This is all the more annoying since the game already stresses the CPU quite a bit, at least with a fast graphics card, and even the Core i9-13900K with the RTX 4090 almost always operates in the CPU bottleneck even in Ultra HD. This makes the assessment quite difficult, as we will see in a moment. EA sees an AMD Ryzen 5 2600 as the minimum configuration, which is okay in itself, but is certainly also due to Denuvo. Thus, this abnormal performance killer also turns into an energy killer per excellence. There is a different way to be sustainable. But I’ll explain that to you in a moment.
Why not a full benchmark test?
I looked for a reasonably GPU- and CPU-heavy high-speed tag scene in the tightly built downtown area and then set the savegame aside manually. Unfortunately, we already know the reasons from the first page. And because there are only a few points on the map where you get spawned, the gas station downtown is the best place to start. Since the game is anything but demanding, I limited myself to the maximum for once, even though that seems a bit one-sided, of course.
If you look carefully at the pictures of the article, you will also see that I have created for myself a trainer that will both cripple the ubiquitous police, and magically fill the purse. Otherwise, I still wouldn’t be done with testing, wouldn’t have run through tens of cars and the benchmark results with the RTX 4090 would certainly have been quite inconsistent. However, I want to emphasize that you must never, but really never, use these little test aids in online mode! My private savegame also has to do without these tricks. Point of honor!
Continuous CPU bottle neck
Regardless of whether I play in Full HD and everything on Ultra in my scene (it’s no worse at night), it hardly deviates from the High settings when you look at the differences in power consumption for the overall system to that of the graphics card. No matter whether High or Ultra settings, the respective difference was only a rich 8 FPS! The graphics card’s power consumption also increases analogously to the overall system in Ultra HD. And what best points to the CPU bottleneck: While the GPU load increases with the resolution, the system load minus the graphics card namely stays almost the same, which suggests an almost identical CPU power consumption (and load)! You can’t reasonably benchmark something like that anymore, for all the love in the world.
| High Settings | ||||||||
| FPS FHD | FPS UHD | Difference | GPU FHD | GPU UHD | Difference | PC FHD | PC UHD | Difference |
| 158,2 | 150,1 | 8.1 FPS | 202 watts | 358 watt | 156 watt | 402 watt | 553 watt | 151 watts |
| 147.6 | 139.4 | 8.2 FPS | 212 watts | 362 watt | 150 watt | 411 watts | 556 watt | 145 watt |
For a game that already permanently hangs in the CPU limit on strong graphics cards, Denuvo is actually a cheek. To explain: With the same graphics setup and the same card, a Core i9-9900K @5 GHz in Ultra-HD already loses 30 FPS compared to the i9-13900K and in Full-HD it is even almost 40 FPS. This is absolute overkill and completely unnecessary, because it always hits the wrong people: the paying buyers.
Summary and conclusion
If we leave Denuvo aside, which also explicitly prevents a buy recommendation, EA has achieved a good result with Need For Speed Unbound, which I would not have expected. The game offers the most important thing you can expect for this price: gameplay and a high fun factor. Beyond certain shortcomings, such as a completely missing savegame management, minor crashes (Denuvo!), an obviously not very stable server and the missing options to assign the control elements of the game pad and steering wheel yourself, everything is actually pretty.
The story is a bit too pseudo-ghetto, but I guess that comes with such a genre. You have to like the comics thing, I just look over it because it’s completely unnecessary. You can certainly do that, but at least it doesn’t harm the fun of the game. There is a risk that old buyer groups will be alienated, because new ones will hardly be won over with something like this. That’s just a quick gripe on my part. The rest is without fault and the free world is really well done.
From my point of view, the biggest progress is the abandonment of an annoying rubber band AI, because here skills are really still worthwhile. If you were really good in the URL races in NFS Underground 2, you could even outrun opponents. The fact that this at least doesn’t seem impossible in NFS Unbound is good news. So the reward model works again, and you can also better gauge yourself against the AI in terms of difficulty levels.
In conclusion, let’s put it this way: with NFS Unbound, EA has at least saved the series for now and not shot it down for good, which is worth something. Besides, Criterion has managed the balancing act between destructiveness and decency. Whether the Frostbite engine has reached its visual limits remains to be seen; it could certainly be more beautiful. I didn’t miss any ray tracing excesses, the puddles look nice enough as it is. And in the end, it’s all about driving. That again was finally fun, thanks for that!
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