Game performance - Crysis WarHEAD | Resident Evil 5 | Far Cry 2

Crysis WARHEAD

As in last year's game, expect to encounter dense jungle environments, barren ice fields, Korean soldiers and plenty of flying aliens. There's no denying that this is more of the same, except here it's a more tightly woven experience with a little less freedom to explore.

With a top-end PC (although Warhead has supposedly benefited from an improved game engine you'll still need a fairly beefy system), rest assured, developer Crytek has enhanced more than just the graphics engine.

Vehicles are more fun to drive, firefights are more intense and focused, and aliens do more than just float around you. More emphasis on the open-ended environments would have been welcome, but a more exciting (though shorter) campaign, a new multiplayer mode, and a whole bunch of new maps make Crysis Warhead an excellent expansion to one of last year's best shooters.

Crysis Warhead has good looks. As mentioned before, the game looks better than Crysis, and it runs better too. Our test machine that struggled a bit to run the original at high settings ran Warhead smoothly with the same settings. Yet as much as you may have heard about Crysis' technical prowess, you'll still be impressed when you feast your eyes on the swaying vegetation, surging water, and expressive animations. Outstanding graphics. Couldn't say more here.

Our image quality settings; we opt for the gamers mode. However, we select DirectX 10 mode as well to allow way more hefty shader code which will take a big toll on the GPU, yet also frame buffer utilization.

• Level Ambush
• Codepath DX10
• Anti aliasing 2xMSAA
• Ingame Quality mode Gamer

Crysis WarHEAD is a game title that likes more than 2 CPU cores AND likes faster clocked processors. We see very similar behaviour amongst the competing MSI BiG Bang Fuzion P55 motherboards.

Suffice to say that for gaming with a GPU bound title like Crysis it really doesn't matter which motherboard you choose. We assume that if you have a high-end system your monitor will also be above 1600x1200.

Resident Evil 5

A new addition to our benchmark suite is Resident Evil 5. Capcom's newly released game ensures you a survival horror sequel that will let you bust up some zombies on your hard drive. Resident Evil 5 PC will support DirectX 9 and 10 along with ultra-high resolutions.

Resident Evil 5 just looks fantastic and has a built in benchmark. We test using DirectX 10.0 mode with 4x AA -- all settings are maxed out including BLUR activated. If you'd like to reproduce the benchmark scores yourself, then please select the fixed benchmark as we opted for a fixed time demo.

Resident Evil really surprised me though as it really likes multi-core processors and especially massively multi-core hyper-threading ones it seems. It is also very sensitive to memory configurations giving the X58/960 combo with triple channel memory a run for the money.

As you can see, thanks to the extremely fast Radeon HD 5870 at the P55 motherboards and is working out really well, but nowhere close to a four core Core i7 processor with tripple channel memory unless highly overclocked.

Far Cry 2

Throw your memory back to the year 2004 and the release of the innovative Far Cry on PC. Developer Crytek managed to fashion one of the most convincing and striking locales in all of gaming, and satisfied gamers with the freedom to pass through the landscape and tackle enemies in almost any way they saw fit. You surely remember Jack Carver and that things were about to get seriously messed up for you, don't you? Well, tough luck. You are no longer at that deserted tropical island but hop into a jeep and arrive at the sandy savannah surroundings of Africa. And that's a change... as much as you'll no longer run into any mutants, aliens, or any superpowers or psychic powers. Also - you are no longer Jack Carver, you assume the role of one of nine different mercenaries who are embedded in the midst of a brutal civil war which rages in an imaginary African nation.
Everything that goes down is involved in a dirty little bush war in central Africa and you'll have to use a rusty AK-47 and whatever bits of scavenged land mine you can duct-tape together. Two factions struggle for supremacy: the United Front for Liberation and Labour and the Alliance for Popular Resistance, and both are known for blood and control.

Far Cry 2 I like very much. Not so much for the gameplay anymore, yet the rendered environment and how the game can react to it. We are in high-quality DX10 mode with 4x AA (anti-aliasing) and 16x AF (anisotropic filtering).

The reality here again is that after 1280x1024 the GPU starts to matter much more than a processor. The default Maximus III results are equal to the MSI Big Bang Fuzion motherboard (navy blue) hence you can see the line.