And now begins our round of gaming benchmarks. First up are Far Cry 2 and Lost Planet 2.
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| Far Cry 2 |
| DX10 Gaming Performance |
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Like the original, FarCry 2 was one of the more visually impressive games to be released on the PC. Courtesy of the Dunia game engine developed by Ubisoft, FarCry 2's game-play is enhanced by advanced environment physics, destructible terrain, high resolution textures, complex shaders, realistic dynamic lighting, and motion-captured animations. We benchmarked the graphics cards in this article with a fully patched version of FarCry 2, using one of the built-in demo runs recorded in the Ranch Map.
Clearly, the Gamer Xtreme 5200’s graphics setup didn’t scale as well here; sometimes that’s acceptable, but in this case the system competed well at the 1920x1080 resolution but didn’t keep pace at lower resolutions, most likely due to CPU overhead from its dual GPU configuration. Regardless, all resolutions ran blazingly fast here of course.
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| Lost Planet 2 |
| DX11 Gaming Experience |
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A follow-up to Capcom’s Lost Planet : Extreme Condition, Lost Planet 2 is a third person shooter that takes place again on E.D.N. III ten years after the story line of the first title. We ran the game’s DX11 mode which makes heavy use of DX11 Tessellation and Displacement mapping and soft shadows. There are also areas of the game that make use of DX11 DirectCompute for things like wave simulation in areas with water. This is one game engine that looks significantly different in DX11 mode when you compare certain environmental elements and character rendering in its DX9 mode versus DX11. We used the Test B option built into the benchmark tool and with all graphics options set to their High Quality values.
In Lost Planet 2 (the first DX11 game in our battery of tests), our CyberPowerPC system fared well, besting its fellow Haswell system, the Digital Storm VIRTUE, by a step at the lowest and highest resolutions. The Digital Storm ODE Level 4, with its dual 7970s, once again beat out the Gamer Xtreme 5200, though.
