Gaming Performance

BioShock Infinite

Publisher: 2K

From our Bioshock Infinite review :

'Your character Booker’s trip to Columbia is in the interest of retrieving a girl, Elizabeth, from captivity. It’s imperative that you find her so that you can clear a pile of debts, but it’s increasingly clear as your time in columbia continues that this isn’t a simple hero's tale. Elizabeth has the power to control “tears in reality" that are popping up all over the city."

"It’s an adult, thoughtful and compelling work that shames many (if not most) other attempts in the medium. Bioshock Infinite is an incredibly good video game. It might be one of the best.'

BioShock Infinite is an example of a game that has a noticeable dependance on CPU speed. Not all games will show this level of variation, if at all, but we felt it important to show the impact of CPU speed, especially when overclocking in a game that will react to it. We use the handy in-built benchmarking tool to run a timedemo from two sections near the start of the game. However, we've found the game-generated results to be unreliable, so use FRAPS to record the frame rate over a 40 second sequence of gameplay during the second test. The results taken are an average of three repeated tests.

Battlefield 4

Publisher: EA

From our Battlefield 4 review:

'From the start to the end of the campaign you literally have no idea who’s who, why they do or don’t like each other and even what part you play in the whole thing – the latter point not being helped by the fact you’re mute throughout the whole game. You just meander from mission to mission and get on with the task set before you.

Still: who cares, right? Battlefield has long been about its multiplayer, and sure enough here, again the game truly shines. Largely it’s a continuation of what came before but there are enough extras that it feels, if not totally new, different enough to learn all over again.'

With its demanding Frostbite 3 engine, Battlefield 4 is a tough challenge for any GPU. We run the game at its highest 'Ultra' settings with motion blur at 50 percent and the resolution scale at 100 percent. We also manually disable MSAA. We run a 60 second benchmark on the game's sixth campaign level, Tashgar, during the on rails section at the level's start, and begin the recording as soon as the subtitle for the first line of dialogue appears on screen.'