NVIDIA nForce 7 Series Arrives – ASUS M3N-HT Deluxe Motherboard

Crysis, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. & World in Conflict

Crysis v1.21

Crysis is a science fiction first-person shooter computer game that was developed by Crytek and published by Electronic Arts. It was released on November 15, 2007 in the United States. The game is based off the CryENGINE2 game engine, which is an extended version of CryENGINE, the game engine behind the hit game Far Cry a number of years ago.

We used FRAPS to benchmark this multi-threaded DirectX 10 game title with patch v1.21 at 1024×768 with low quality settings.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. v1.0005

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl uses the ‘X-ray Engine’ to power the graphics. It is a DirectX 8/9 Shader Model 3.0 graphics engine. Up to a million polygons can be onscreen at any one time, which makes it one of the more impressive engines on the market today. The engine features HDR rendering, parallax and normal mapping, soft shadows, widescreen support, weather effects and day/night cycles. As with other engines that utilize deferred shading (such as Unreal Engine 3 and CryENGINE2), the X-ray Engine does not support anti-aliasing with dynamic lighting enabled. However, a “fake” form of anti-aliasing can be enabled with the static lighting option; this format utilizes a technique to blur the image to give the false impression of anti-aliasing. The game takes place in a thirty square kilometer area, and both the outside and inside of this area is rendered to the same amount of detail.

World in Conflict v1.007

World in Conflict (also known as WiC or WIC) is a real-time tactical video game developed by Massive Entertainment and published by Sierra Entertainment for Windows and the Xbox 360. The game was released in North America on 18 September 2007 and was included in our testing as it is a recent DirectX 10 game title. It also has a threaded engine for multi-core processor support, which is ideal for this testing. The plot in World in Conflict is to defend their country, their hometown, and their families in the face of Soviet-led World War III, delivering an epic struggle of courage and retribution. You are a field commander leading the era’s most powerful military machines in the heroic effort to turn back the invasionone city and suburb at a time. Let’s get on to the benchmarking! WIC was tested using the most recent patch available, which is patch number 007.

Benchmark Results: With low quality settings and a resolution of 1024×768 all of the integrated solutions left more to be desired, but these are all tough game titles for integrated graphics. The NVIDIA 780a SLI graphics solution lagged behind the AMD 780G graphics in all the tests except for Crysis. Just for fun, we changed memory kits from 2GB to 4GB to see how much more performance we could milk from Crysis on the integrated graphics. Adding more memory helped, but not enough to make a night and day difference.