Gaming Performance: Single GeForce 9800 GTX

Crysis

Publisher: Electronic Arts

We tested the game using the 64-bit executable under and DirectX 10 with the 1.21 patch applied. We used a custom timedemo recorded on the Harbor map which is more representative of gameplay than the built-in benchmark that renders things much faster than you're going to experience in game.

For our testing, we set Texture Detail, Shadows Quality, Physics Quality, Shaders Quality and Water Quality to High, while all other settings were set to medium. Because of how intense the game is, we tested with both anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering disabled at resolutions above 1680x1050 for the time being. There is currently no support for anisotropic filtering in the game, but you can still force it from the driver control panel.




The XFX 790i and Gigabyte X48 DDR3 boards perform pretty much identically, however bear in mind that we didn't have to adjust the memory timings of the Gigabyte like we did the XFX – with the QX9770, the XFX 790i dropped from 8-6-6-17-1T in 2D to 8-8-8-20-2T, whereas the Gigabyte remained at 7-6-6-18-1T throughout.

This is more hassle if you use the XFX 790i – essentially you will have to leave a PC at the slower speeds to keep it uniformly stable. However we can also look at it from a different angle: where if XFX can improve its BIOS to get the board to run 3D applications at the same latencies the board is (Prime95) stable at in 2D apps, it should again improve the performance. At the moment it's running at these slower settings and still matching the Gigabyte X48T-DQ6 in performance.

On the DDR2 boards, the QX9770 performance is close but still a few frames per second behind the DDR3 boards, however it's the dual core E8500 that takes the biggest hit to the framerate. At these frame rates, the difference between 27 and 32 is quite noticeable.

World in Conflict

Publisher: Sierra

For our testing purposes, we used a full retail copy of the game and patched it to version 1.007, which includes a few fixes and some improved performance under DirectX 10. We used a manual run through from the Invasion level, which incorporates all of the effects we've discussed above. We chose not to use the built-in benchmark because it's largely CPU-limited. We used the "very high" preset, and controlled anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering via the advanced settings tab.


World in Conflict sees a large advantage from using DDR3 boards over those using DDR2 – the performance jumps several frames per second on both the XFX 790i and Gigabyte X48 boards, with the XFX board coming out trumps by a few fps overall. In fact, the XFX 790i with an E8500 even manages to outperform the Gigabyte X48T with a QX9770 installed – both average and minimum frame rates are higher.

Overall, the difference between the E8500 and QX9770 CPUs is very small – just one or two frames per second at most.