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 medium. Because of how intense the game is, we tested with both anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering disabled at resolutions above 1680x1050 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.



The performance figures are probably exactly what we'd expect given motherboard cost - the "enthusiast" 790FX chipset sits nicely at the top, while the 790GX and 780G fritter down in FPS performance, however even with the IGP disabled (as in this case) it's surprising to see the gap quite "large" between 790GX and 790FX which use the same CPU. The 790GX noses at the underbelly of the nForce 780a, although we think the nForce 780a is actually under performing because the NF200 chipset bolted onto the nForce 780a only offers optimisations for SLI, not single card, so in this instance it merely increases the latency by adding another stop in the pipe.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

Publisher: Activision

Built on an updated version of id Software's Doom 3 engine, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is a team-based first person shooter that recently obtained the title of being the first game to use John Carmack's megatexture technology: a single texture that spans the entire map.

ET:QW also makes use of many vehicles and large open areas which means the action in view can get really intensive in this team based shooter. It's also the only game in this suite that utilises OpenGL instead of the pretty much industry-standard DirectX API. We used the full retail version of the game patched to version 1.5.

We recorded a timenetdemo on the Valley level which lasts for several minutes during an online game – this used lots of the different graphical effects to create what we've deemed to be a fairly typical slice of action to stress the system. We also created a custom autoexec file that enabled ultra high video settings, over and above that of the standard in game "high", while soft particles was left disabled for the time being.


The ET:QW performance is pretty linear between the AMD 790GX, 780G and Nvidia nForce 780a, although the AMD 790FX does drops a few FPS shy in this test.

World in Conflict

Publisher: Sierra

For our testing purposes, we used a full retail copy of the game and patched it to version 1.007, which includes a few fixes and some improved performance under DirectX 10. We used the "very high" present, and controlled anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering via the advanced settings tab.


World in Conflict seems to greatly prefer the Nvidia nForce 780a in this test, as it pulls out over 10FPS on average faster than all the AMD boards. We double checked the settings, restarted the system and re-ran the numbers again but they were consistent.