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 10 and DirectX 9.



Overclocking the CPU and graphics cards/IGPs together, there is really very little benefit seen at all - just a single frame per second from the 785G and 780G, but the HD 4350 on the MSI 770 board manages to extract three fps more. In DX9 mode with the lowest settings, at least the 785G is ever so slightly more playable as it noses the 25 to 30 fps mark, but you'll not tell any difference between it overclocked or otherwise.

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.

For our gameplay testing, we did a 90 second manual run through in the second mission of the game.


The difference is the opposite with Call of Duty 4, as the HD 4350 only extracts an extra two fps on average, and just one on the minimum, but the IGPs see several fps improvements, in both average and minimum frame rates. The 785G in particular sees an 11 fps rise and a minimum nosing 20 fps that really does make it mostly playable, providing that is, you can tolerate the low detail setting.

Left 4 Dead

Publisher: Valve

Left 4 Dead is built on the latest version of Valve's Source engine. It is an intensely popular online game, although not particularly graphically demanding until the highest settings are enabled. We manually played the first section of No Mercy from the rooftop down through the building, at a low resolution, no anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering with all medium settings.


Left 4 Dead also sees similar positive gains for the overclocked IGPs, raising the minimum frame-rates by several fps to around 30, with high average rates providing a lovely smooth gameplay. The HD 4350 is well into the smooth gameplay area at this setting and could easily be pushed up a notch in terms of detail or resolution though, as it's about 35 per cent faster.