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 9.



At stock speeds the sideport memory seems to work to the MSI's slight advantage as the board leads the pack, although not by much in minimum FPS. The Gigabyte UD2 still commands the best average frame rates by a long way, but the MSI is still better than most boards at stock speeds.

Overclocked and the MSI is let down by its resistance to stability at higher clock speeds and is let down quite considerably as the Asus and Gigabyte boards command considerably greater frame rates.

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.



Like above, again we have a stock performance that is really very good: highest average FPS and a very high minimum. Sideport memory might not make a huge amount of difference, but here it clearly does offer a least some benefit.

Overclocked, it cannot keep up with the higher clocked boards in average frame rate, but its minimums offer a smoother gameplay experience than the rest. A win for MSI here.