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 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.


Now we've hit gaming performance, the UD3R noses ahead in Crysis compared to other P45 boards, ahead of the performance nForce 780i SLI and other P45s from Asus, MSI and Gigabyte too. The only boards that are faster are the DDR3 based Gigabyte X48T and the Asus Maximus II Formula, which is predominantly a "gaming board" anyway.

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 1.5.

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 ET:QW the Gigabyte UD3R almost matches the Maximus II Formula again edging out a few frames per second over most of the other boards we've tested providing excellent performance.

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 the "very high" present, and controlled anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering via the advanced settings tab.


Finally in World in Conflict the UD3R hits the top of the table by a fraction of a frame per second on average, and even though it doesn't have the highest minimum, at 15fps it's a fairly high average.