The high-end GeForce GTX 480 is more than capable of playing this game in all of its glory at resolutions as high as 2560x1600 with PhysX enabled, so it is not the $500+ graphics cards we are concerned with. Even the more affordable GeForce GTX 460 can handle PhysX at resolutions such as 1680x1050 or lower when coupled with a fast enough processor.

Sadly for those with AMD graphics cards playing Mafia II with PhysX enabled is not going to run very well, unless you have a Nvidia graphics card handling the PhysX workload. Even with our Core i7 920 processor clocked at 3.70GHz, the Radeon HD 5970 and 5870 cards were limited to 22fps at 1680x1050. With a dedicated Nvidia PhysX card even the old Radeon HD 4890 can provide playable performance at 1680x1050, however factoring in the cost of the additional graphics card this path makes little sense. The best option for AMD users is to disable PhysX and forget it even exists. We suspect most will get over the missing rubble. While we would not normally recommend disabling anti-aliasing in games that support it, we must admit this feature made little difference in Mafia II. Owners of speedy GPUs won't feel the need to turn it off, but to give you tangible examples, the Radeon HD 4850 was an incredible 78% faster with anti-aliasing disabled while the GeForce 9800 GT was also 52% faster.