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 timedemo recorded on the Harbor 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 for the 720 Black Edition is very good, slightly exceeding that of both the E7500 at 4.2GHz (which is 500MHz faster), as well as the Q6600 at 3.5GHz which has an extra core. When it comes to platform value above, we can see the AMD CPU is above the average trend line, meaning it offers better value for money compared to its Intel rivals in this game.

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.

The game uses DirectX 10.1 to improve anti-aliasing performance and quality. The improvements are made by reading the multisampled depth buffer in a single pass - something that was only introduced officially with DirectX 10.1. However, Ubisoft has also made the enhancements available to Nvidia hardware as well through a DirectX 10 extension.

We used a retail version of the game and the in-built gameplay demo set to Ultra-Very High settings under DirectX 10.


Far Cry 2 also benefits when run on the overclocked AMD CPU, stretching out a few frame per second lead on average and also upping the minimum frame rate to give smoother gameplay too. Accordingly, the graph above shows the green dot above the trend line indicating the overclocked 720 Black Edition gives better value for money as well.