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 all the settings to High. 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 single card testing they both again perform about the same in Crysis - half an fps difference in favour of the Asus is not noticeable, but the Asus seems to perform better in a multi-GPU configuration with CrossFire-X and the latest Radeon HD 4890 GPUs by a couple of fps on average.

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 Ultra-Very High settings under DirectX 10.



Again in a single GPU configuration both the boards perform almost identically, but the MSI's performance drops off in a CrossFire-X situation affording several more fps in favour of the Asus.