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 time demo recorded on the Harbour 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 1,680 x 1,050 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.



Crysis performance is not bad - there's a nice increase in minimum FPS at stock speeds, however despite the extra CPU MHz, the Asus board fails to command any sort of advantage when overclocked. It's low down the table, but the fractional difference in FPS is arbitrary in the real world and makes no difference to the experience.

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.



Far Cry 2 sees a much stronger advantage when overclocked than above, however the difference it still marginal. At stock speeds the Gigabyte UD5 is still convincingly faster by several FPS even though the Maximus scores high on the table.