Benchmark Results: Crysis And Unreal Tournament 3
Once again we start with Crysis, which is one of the most hardware-demanding games available. It would take a far more expensive system with more GPU power to be playable at the maximum DX10 Very High settings used for our testing.
One high note this month is that with higher GPU clock speeds, the overclocked $625 PC finally manages to break 30 frames per second (FPS) at our lowest resolution.
After enabling 4x anti-aliasing (AA), things get worse, so we will again look at more realistic playable settings for Crysis.
At medium details, it’s possible that the Catalyst 8.12 drivers provided a boost in performance as we see up to a 10 FPS increase at stock speeds versus last month's results. We would need to try both driver versions to determine how much was from the E7300 and how much (if any) was from the drivers. At 1680x1050 medium details, the overclocked budget gamer now averaged over 60 FPS for the first time. Raising resolution to 1920x1200, it averaged 44.70 FPS at stock and 53.29 FPS overclocked. And lastly, at 1280x1024 high details, the average at stock speeds was 38.04 FPS, which rose to 44.94 FPS overclocked. Crysis can still play very well on such a system, but would require a blend of medium/high details as resolution is increased.
With Unreal Tournament 3, very playable performance is achieved at the highest detail levels. At stock speeds, frame rates seem to be CPU limited, while we see some separation by resolution with the overclocked PC.
After forcing eye candy in the drivers, we see a drop in FPS due to the added strain on the GPU. But the HD 4850 still provides very playable results, and once overclocked, even averages above 60 FPS at our highest resolution.
