Flight and Open World Games

We have several types of titles in this category.

HAWX2 was one of the initial DirectX11 titles to offer Tessellation and we use the popular standalone benchmark tool. It was a AMD endorsed title for some time but we see here that older NVIDIA SLI can even beat the new HD7970, at least at the 1920x1200 resolution. We tested with graphical settings maxed out with no overrides. This shows how competitive older gaming class hardware can be. We verified our results by running additional passes.

Grand Theft Auto IV uses a cross platform, console oriented DirectX 9 Game engine which is known to be resource heavy on the PC. The game and the game engine itself cannot make full use of the graphics hardware available and is CPU heavy. According to patches, support for SLI is available but not Crossfire. Since GTAIV is video memory dependant can use as much as 1.6-1.7GB at 25x16 with all options maxed out we were looking forward to seeing what the results with GTAIV were considering 7970 ships with 3GB but we were disappointed at the result.

We tested the HD7970 over the Christmas/New Year Holiday period pre-launch so limited support was available to us.

Just Cause 2 is an NVIDIA endorsed title featuring optional graphical features for DirectX10 that are only available on NVIDIA cards. We tested with these on as owners of strong graphics and CPU such as the i7-3960X would want to max out all options available to them. At the maximum settings available to both the NVIDIA and AMD graphics, we have a significant lead for the Radeon, with another 10fps added for a meagre 100 MHz overclock.