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.



With a single GTX 280 the performance matches the Asus AM3 board at the top of the table and squeezes a slight lead out ahead of the MSI. Clearly both Gigabyte and Asus have the PCI-Express working very well, but there's not a huge difference between all three. In CrossFire mode, the Gigabyte suffers even more than the MSI, and both of them are a few fps off the Asus board that now stands clearly out from the crowd.

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.



On the other hand, the Far Cry 2 performance while the Gigabyte board might match with a consistent 30fps minimum, the average fps is a notch slower than both the Asus and MSI, although realistically it's only half a frame per second so very little difference. Going multi-GPU like Crysis in CrossFire, the Gigabyte board lounges at the bottom of the table though.