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.




When overclocked, the performance of the Gigabyte was far better, although not performance leading as we would have expected from a fractionally greater overclock on the CPU, a higher Base Clock and the fast DDR3 memory. While the Gigabyte board doesn't lead in average fps, with a single GPU it does fractionally lead in minimum fps. There's little experiential difference between any of the three boards, however.

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 the Gigabyte board performed far better when overclocked - leaping from last to a clear first when we used CrossFire, and providing a consistently fast result in average or minimum fps with Nvidia GPUs installed.