Maingear SHIFT Super Stock X79 System Review

Gaming: Metro 2033, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., and Batman Arkham City

Metro 2033
DX11 Gaming Performance

 
Metro 2033

Metro 2033 is your basic post-apocalyptic first person shooter game with a few rather unconventional twists. Unlike most FPS titles, there is no health meter to measure your level of ailment, but rather you’re left to deal with life, or lack there-of more akin to the real world with blood spatter on your visor and your heart rate and respiration level as indicators. The game is loosely based on a novel by Russian Author Dmitry Glukhovsky. Metro 2003 boasts some of the best 3D visuals on the PC platform currently including a DX11 rendering mode that makes use of advanced depth of field effects and character model tessellation for increased realism.

It took awhile to get there, but we finally dug up a benchmark capable of stressing the SHIFT, albeit it still managed a buttery smooth 60fps at 2560x1600 with all the settings maxed out. Performance doesn't appear to scale as well in Metro 2033 as it does in other games. Compared to an Alienware X51 system with a Core i5 2320 processor and single GeForce GTX 555 videocard, the SHIFT system 'only' doubled the number of frames per second at a 1920x1080 resolution.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Call of Pripyat
DX11 Gaming Performance


S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

Call of Pripyat is the third game in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series and throws in DX11 to the mix. This benchmark is based on one of the locations found within the latest game. Testing includes four stages and utilizes various weather conditions, as well as different time of day settings. It offers a number of presets and options, including multiple versions of DirectX, resolutions, antialiasing, etc. SunShafts represents the most graphically challenging stage available. We conducted our testing with DX11 enabled, multiple resolutions, and Ultra settings.




Listen, we're fully aware that it's not fair to pit a $7,500 dream machine against systems that cost only a fraction of that amount, but that's life. The reason we're doing it here is because there's not much else left for the SHIFT to prove, and also because it's interesting to see what kind of performance advantage you can expect if you decide to sell a kidney and use the money on a no-compromise machine.

Batman: Arkham City
DirectX Gaming Performance


Batman: Arkham City

Batman: Arkham City is a sequel to 2009’s Game of the Year winning Batman: Arkham Asylum. This recently released sequel, however, lives up to and even surpasses the original. The story takes place 18 months after the original game. Quincy Sharp, the onetime administrator of Arkham Asylum, has become mayor and convinced Gotham to create "Arkham City" by walling off the worst, most crime-ridden areas of the city and turning the area into a giant open-air prison. The game has DirectX 9 and 11 rendering paths, with support for tessellation, multi-view soft shadows, and ambient occlusion. We tested in DX11 mode with all in-game graphical options set to their maximum values, at various resolutions.

Batman: Arkham City stands as the only disappointing benchmark in our gamut of tests, though the blame doesn't fall on Maingear. The game doesn't fully support CrossFire, which is why the scores are comparatively weak here despite having three high-end videocards attempting to push pixels. Whether you want to put the blame on AMD's driver team or developer Rockstead Studios is up to you, either way, we expect performance to improve dramatically once there's a software fix.
 

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