MSI N550GTX-Ti Cyclone II OC Video Card Review

H.A.W.X. 2 Benchmark

We wanted to include a new benchmark for this review, so Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. 2 was added in to see how it looked. This benchmark got some attention recently for not being neutral over the failure to use optimized code for better tessellation performance on AMD and NVIDIA cards.

Aerial warfare has evolved. So have you. As a member of the ultra-secret H.A.W.X. 2 squadron, you are one of the chosen few, one of the truly elite. You will use finely honed reflexes, bleeding-edge technology and ultra-sophisticated aircraft – their existence denied by many governments – to dominate the skies. You will do so by mastering every nuance of the world’s finest combat aircraft. You will slip into enemy territory undetected, deliver a crippling blow and escape before he can summon a response. You will use your superior technology to decimate the enemy from afar, then draw him in close for a pulse-pounding dogfight. And you will use your steel nerve to successfully execute night raids, aerial refueling and more. You will do all this with professionalism, skill and consummate lethality. Because you are a member of H.A.W.X. 2 and you are one of the finest military aviators the world has ever known. H.A.W.X. 2 is due out on November 16, 2010 for PC gamers.

We ran the benchmark in DX11 mode and cranked up all the Antialiasing and Advanced image quality settings. We also enabled hardware tessellation as without that setting turned on the cards were getting well over 120FPS at a resolution of 1920×1200 and over 160FPS at 1280×1025. We wanted to stress the cards a bit and enabling tessellation appeared to do the trick as you’ll see below.

Benchmark Results: HAWX 2 is an amazing looking benchmark and we thought it would slow the GeForce GTX 550 down, but the cards were able to run the test above 60FPS at 1920×1200! The MSI N550GTX-Ti Cyclone II 1GD5/OC was found to be 5% faster than the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti!