Far Cry 2

Publisher: Ubisoft

Far Cry 2 is the latest first person shooter from Ubisoft, and while it continues the Far Cry franchise that Crytek started in 2004, this game is built on its own in-house engine and has no association - other than its name - to anything Crytek has worked on or is working on now. We used a retail version of the game patched to version 1.02, and used the in-built "Action" gameplay demo set to the lowest settings under DirectX 10 and DirectX 9.



The Gigabyte board has a surprising performance lead in Far Cry 2 at stock speed, but the Asus still provides a marginally smoother gameplay with a higher minimum FPS. Overclocked and the performance lead is notably stretched by a few FPS: clearly the slight GPU and CPU MHz advantage on the Asus board helps.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Publisher: Activision

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is different to all previous Call of Duty games, as it moves the action out of the World War II era and into the modern day. We have used the full version of the game with the 1.7 patch applied.

The game runs on a proprietary engine, which includes features like true world dynamic lighting, HDR lighting, and dynamic shadowing, however for our purposes here we only enabled depth, bullet impact marks and RagDoll effects. All the other settings were set to Medium or Normal, and the anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering were controlled from inside the game, and turned to their lowest settings.



In Call of Duty 4 the Asus and Gigabyte boards are pretty much tied and when overclocked the Gigabyte sees a fractionally higher average but equally lower minimum.