Maingear Potenza Super Stock SFF System Review

 

 

Alien vs. Predator
DirectX 11 Gaming Performance


Alien vs. Predator

The Alien vs. Predator benchmark makes use of the advanced Tessellation, screen space ambient occlusion and high-quality shadow features, available with DirectX 11. In addition to enabling all of the aforementioned DirectX 11 related features offered by this benchmark, we also switched on 4X anti-aliasing along with 16X anisotropic filtering to more heavily tax the graphics cards being tested.

Aliens vs Predator is one of the more demanding DX11 benchmarks, and here too the Potenza was able to keep things somewhat playable at 2560x1600. Few gamers frag at such a high resolution, and at 1920x1080, the Ponteza benched around 60fps, offering plenty of headroom for those times when framerates take a temporary dip.

 

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.

Metro 2033 proved more of a challenge on a 30-inch panel with the eye candy turned up. Things are playable, but also prone to stutter if there's a ton of action on the screen. At 1920x1080, the Potenza is able to keep things even keeled.

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.

Still to this day, Batman: Arkham City hasn't figured out how to take advantage of multiple AMD cards in a Crossfire configuration (or AMD has figured out how to write a proper driver for the game), and the result is that the single-GPU Potenza  comes within striking distance of systems like the Maingear X79 SHIFT with three Radeon HD 7970 graphics cards. Whereas the Potenza benched 40fps at 2560x1600, the X79 SHIFT managed just an additional 8fps (48fps total).

On it's own the Potenza again proves a capable gamer that's able to handle high resolutions and with the graphics detail turned up.

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