For our next set of tests, we moved on to some in-game benchmarking with Left 4 Dead 2 and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars and a full test with 3DMark Vantage. When testing low-power platforms with L4D2 or ET:QW, we dialed things in to moderate to maximum resolutions for the LCD panel that was available in each test case. Since these are more entry-level game tests on highly mobile platforms, we left anti-aliasing turned off and image quality settings set from moderate to high levels where possible.
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3D Gaming: Vantage, ET: Quake Wars and Left 4 Dead 2
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Testing Zacate's GPU
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These scores were recored using 3DMark Vantage's "Entry" level preset. As you can see, the Zotac and Gigabyte E-350 APU-based configurations finished well ahead of all of the competition.
The results in our custom in-game tests were mixed. First off, note the huge performance increase for the Zotac and Gigabyte E-350-based systems versus AMD's reference platform in the OpenGL ET:QW test. AMD seems to have made some major progress with driver optimization, as now, with the most recent Catalyst drivers, the E-350's integrated Radeon HD 6310 GPU finished only a few frames per second behind NVIDIA's next-gen Ion, whereas before it was completely blown out of the water. In the DirectX L4D test, performance is also up slightly and the Zotac and Gigabyte systems outpace the competition at all of the resolutions we tested.
