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 Texture Detail, Shadows Quality, Physics Quality, Shaders Quality and Water Quality to High, while all other settings were set 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.





Gaming puts a different kind of stress on the memory sub-system - one which we found needed us to reduce the Flex II speed from 1,141MHz down to 1,124MHz. While we've previously seen Crysis benefit from more memory performance, it seems like the latency gets the better of it here. Even after retests the system would consistently not break the 26FPS barrier at this speed with the same medium-high latencies. In fact, surprisingly the low latency, low bandwidth Crucial Ballistix performs a fraction better here, but it's still a shade behind the Flex II at 1,066MHz with average latencies.

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 1.4.

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.


In ET:QW the extra bandwidth does make a difference, with the Flex II stretching out a few FPS lead over the Crucial Ballistix. However there's not much between the 1,066MHz and 1,124MHz Flex II memory speeds - less than half a frame in fact.

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 a manual run through from the Invasion level, which incorporates all of the effects the game has to offer. We chose not to use the built-in benchmark because it's largely CPU-limited. We used the "very high" preset, and controlled anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering via the advanced settings tab.


In World in Conflict there's basically no difference between them all - a fraction more here, a fraction less there - even between averages and minimums the gameplay performance is consistent.