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.


Crysis performance is in favour of the Asus here - the average frame rate is only a fraction faster with a single GTX 280, but notably more so with CrossFire enabled. We checked to see whether changing the PCI-Express slot used made any difference and there was at most a single frame per second difference for the MSI.

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.


With a single GTX 280 there's very little difference, although the performance is still slightly in favour of the Asus.


Unfortunately for the MSI, the CrossFire-X performance is still down by several frames per second in both average, but with a much lower minimum FPS the gameplay smoothness is becoming an issue.