BIOSHOCK
Working our way down the row of more and more demanding games we come to the third benchmark title; a little game by the name of BioShock. This game started life with the ability to play on DX9 hardware, but was quickly updated to support DX10 fully. Testing here once again consisted of using Fraps to record frame rates. Our level of choice for testing was the final battle, which includes all sorts of beautiful effects. Settings were ramped up to the highest levels, and we set the resolution to 1680×1050. With all this done, the ZOTAC card posted a performance gain of 13% over the 9800 GTX. Though not immediately staggering, this is still a double-digit boost.
As for playability, the game pretty well never dropped below 40 FPS during the entire boss battle. Even with fire being flung my way, and some big glowing guy charging me at every opportunity, the game play was still smooth as silk.
Crysis
Finally we come the game title known as the Elephant in the room to many gamers. That title would be Crysis. It’s taken some time for the hardware to catch up to this title to the point where it’s playable. That has made it a hard game to ignore, as its open play style and incredible graphics make for an amazing experience. To test this experience, we used another tool from the folks over at HardwareOC. The HOC GPU demo was used for testing, and when running the benchmark settings we set to the “High” preset and resolution was set to 1680×1050. Once the dust settled, the ZOTAC card was 20% ahead of the 9800 GTX. This is great, as it also means that gameplay should be much smoother.
Well I can happily say that it was an overall smooth experience. Though I would prefer an average of 60 FPS to give enough headroom for complex scenes, 40 FPS isn’t anything to sneeze at in this highly demanding title. At this frame rate, I rarely experienced any slide shows, and was able to proceed through the game without incident.
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