Once again we ripped and re-encoded Stargate and Equilibrium to iPod Video AVC to see how well they performed on our test rig. As noted in previous reviews, Stargate’s longer running time and most importantly much brighter scenes puts more stress on the test rig than the dark and brooding Equilibrium.
Gaming Benchmarks
For gaming, we had to pick the two best stress tests we could think of. We needed titles that didn’t just thrash the GPU; they needed to lay a beating to all components in the system. The first choice was obvious, as Supreme Commander is an RTS of epic scale. With its expansive, world spanning play style, you do need a decent system to run it. With settings cranked, it can be downright hostile to a performance system. In addition to that, we ran Crysis. This first person shooter is one of the latest DX10 titles to market, and with destructible buildings (and enemies) its physics and AI put a good deal of strain on the processor and memory. We still ran our tests at multiple resolutions to see how big the split was between results.
To test Supreme Commander we cranked everything to maximum, added a little anti-aliasing for flavour. What we found was interesting, as there was only an 8% performance difference between the two resolutions. The reason this is interesting is because there is 26.5% more pixels on the screen. This means that the performance can for the most part be chalked up to other subsystems like CPU, Memory, and Hard Drive; a theory that is further given credence by the performance log for SupComMark showing a remarkably high FPS count for both tests. How does this all tie in? Well an 8% drop in performance with such a resolution jump is nothing to sneeze at, and shows that the M3A32-MVP Deluxe performs very well.
Now we move to the system dominator known as Crysis. This follows well in the footsteps of it’s spiritual predecessor Far Cry, in that it’s pure punishment on computers that are considered modern around the time of the title’s release. We ran both the CPU and GPU benchmarks separately, and found the same thing we found in the Supreme Commander tests. The performance drop between resolutions was relatively insignificant on the CPU tests, indicating once again the the Asus board performs well and handles high performance games with aplomb.