With the synthetic benchmarks completed, we dove into some real-world in-game testing. We started with Far Cry 2, which won’t strain a modern system, but will give us a look at the rig’s DX10 capabilities. Then we took a look at Lost Planet 2, which boasts DX11 support, tessellation, and some stunning water effects.
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| Far Cry 2 |
| DX10 Gaming Performance |
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When it comes to lush vegetation in a steaming, sinister jungle, no one pulls it off quite like Ubisoft does in its Far Cry series. Far Cry 2 uses high quality textures, complex shaders, and dynamic lighting to create a realistic environment. The benchmark demo runs you through multiple areas of the map and from several different angles, while explosions and other events take place.
Same song, second verse: The Zeus Mini hung pretty tightly with other Intel Core i7-4770K systems here, especially those with similar graphics setups.
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| Lost Planet 2 |
| DX11 Gaming Performance |
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We used Lost Planet 2 to test the system’s DX11 performance. This game’s benchmark features soldiers attempting to take down a massive beast that seems to shrug off their firepower. There is a ton of action in the five or so minutes that the benchmark runs, and we’ve seen the test stutter when being run by lesser systems. We used Test B and set all graphics settings to High Quality. We also boosted the Anti-Aliasing setting to 4x before we ran the benchmark.
There’s a little more separation in this DX11 title between the systems, and the Zeus Mini is in the slower category. However, it left all of the single-GPU based systems in the dust (save for the Titan equipped AVADirect machine) and actually posted a better score than the Digital Storm VIRTUE system.
