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, all settings 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.







In Crysis, it's clear that both boards are evenly matched, continuing the trend of remarkably similar performance between them. However, we had significant problems getting the Sapphire board to load Crysis, and following a full reinstall and trying numerous Forceware driver versions, were forced to update the BIOS via a bootable USB device (remember, neither board has an inbuilt BIOS flashing system). Once we'd updated to the latest version (PCA77003), Crysis started and ran fine.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

Publisher: Activision

Built on an updated version of id Software's Doom 3 engine, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is a team-based first person shooter that recently obtained the title of being the first game to use John Carmack's megatexture technology: a single texture that spans the entire map.

ET:QW also makes use of many vehicles and large open areas which means the action in view can get really intensive in this team based shooter. It's also the only game in this suite that utilises OpenGL instead of the pretty much industry-standard DirectX API. We used the full retail version of the game patched to version 1.4.

We recorded a timenetdemo on the Valley level which lasts for several minutes during an online game – this used lots of the different graphical effects to create what we've deemed to be a fairly typical slice of action to stress the system. We also created a custom autoexec file that enabled ultra high video settings, over and above that of the standard in game "high", while soft particles was left disabled for the time being.


In ETQW, the Abit board is significantly faster than the Sapphire, by a margin of five frames per second. The fact that the margin is so great is very surprising given Sapphire's 2D performance, although it seems Abit's PCI-Express performance is simply better here.

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 the game has to offer. We used the "high" preset, and controlled anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering via the advanced settings tab.


Interestingly, in the case of World in Conflict which is a more intensive DX10 game than ETQW, the Sapphire board comes out on top, with an average five frame per second advantage, and a three frame per second minimum advantage too.