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.



We tried both DX10 and DX9 to see if the "DirectX 10(.1) capable" graphics chipsets could actually yield a performance that's playable, even at the lowest settings. Unfortunately, the outcome was no. The 785G is almost, barely playable under DX9 mode in Far Cry 2, squeezing out several fps more than the older 780G that can barely exceed 20 fps. The discrete Radeon HD 4350 is far, far better, and if you really want to do some light, low resolution gaming it's worth spilling out the £25 for a passive card.

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.

For our gameplay testing, we did a 90 second manual run through in the second mission of the game.


Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is still a very popular multiplayer game, and not so graphically intensive so we included it. Clearly the HD 4350 is still the card to buy, even though its minimum fps drops below 30. In comparison the 785G can average over 30 fps, two frames per second faster than the older 780G, but both boards still stutter in gameplay and drop to a low 14 to 16 fps, despite the low resolution.

Left 4 Dead

Publisher: Valve

Left 4 Dead is built on the latest version of Valve's Source engine. It is an intensely popular online game, although not particularly graphically demanding until the highest settings are enabled. We manually played the first section of No Mercy from the rooftop down through the building, at a low resolution, no anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering with all medium settings.


Left 4 Dead is another popular online game, and at even medium settings on the 785G the game was very playable, averaging a solid 41 fps with a minimum of 26 fps only when there were hoards of zombies on screen. The difference between this and the 780G is a more notable five frames per second too, with a slightly better minimum for the 785G, but these scores are eclipsed by the HD 4350 that creates a very playable and very smooth framerate.