Game performance

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? 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).

Again a victory for the X58 combo with Core i7 940. The reality here again is that after 1280x1024 the GPU starts to matter more, it will max out and as such it's not really that CPU bound anymore.

Battlefield Bad Company 2 (DX11)

The Battlefield series has been running for quite a while. The last big entry in the series, Bad Company, was a console exclusive, much to the disappointment of PC gamers everywhere. DICE broke the exclusivity with the sequel, thankfully, and now PC owners are treated to the best Battlefield since Battlefield 2.

The plot follows the four soldiers of Bad Company as they track down a "new" super weapon in development by Russian forces. You might not immediately get that this game is about Bad Company, as the intro mission starts off with a World War II raid, but it all links together in the end.

We have a new title in the benchmark test suite, it's Battlefield Bad Company 2. I'm including it to proof you can play the very latest games all tweaked out at high quality on this little Mini ITX motherboard.

Next to being a great game for gameplay, it's also an awesome title to test both graphics cards, processors and thus platforms with. The game has native support DirectX 11 and on processor testing side of things, parallelized processing supporting two to eight parallel threads, which is great if you have a quad core processor.

We opt to test DX11 solely for this title as we want to look at the most modern performance and image quality. DX11 wise we get as extra softened dynamic shadows and shader based performance improvements.  A great game to play, a great game image quality wise. We raise the bar image quality settings wise and will continue to compare results with future hardware.

• DirectX 11 enabled
• 8x Multi-sample Anti aliasing
• 16 Anisotropic filtering
• All image quality settings enabled at maximum