Game Benchmarks: First-Person Shooters
We have recently updated and streamlined our game benchmarks for the System Builder Marathons.
Let’s begin with the first-person shooter Crysis:
Considering that this benchmark is taken at the highest detail settings, this system fares incredibly well. The sub-$1,500 system is making Crysis playable at its maximum detail settings at 1280x1024 normally, and at 1680x1050 when overclocked. There was a time not too long ago when sub-$2,000 machines couldn’t dream of playing Crysis at its maximum settings at any resolution.
When 4x anti-aliasing is added, things slow down below the point of playing comfortably, except for the overclocked system running at 1280x1024.
Having said that, let’s face it; not a lot of machines can play Crysis at maximum settings, especially with anti-aliasing applied. Lowering detail a bit still offers gorgeous Crysis playability at very smooth frame rates on this mid-range system.
Let’s examine our other first-person shooter, Unreal Tournament 3:
Unreal Tournament 3 employs a gorgeous and well-optimized 3D engine, and the Radeon 4850 cards in Crossfire configuration eat it up and spit it out. Even without the overclock, the system reaches over 70 frames per second, on average, at 1920x1200.
Let’s see what happens when anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering are applied for some even nicer visuals:
From the frame rates, you can hardly tell that AA and AF have been forced on in the drivers. Once again, even without overclocking the mid-range system, we get an average frame rate higher than 70 fps at 1920x1200.
