Testing – Gaming
It’s all well and good seeing the numbers from benchmarking suites, but how does this translate into real-world performance for applications such as gaming? We’re going to utilize a number of gaming tools to give us a good idea.

Firstly we use the Alien Vs. Predator standalone benchmarking tool. Utilizing DX11, AvP can push your hardware using Tessellation and advanced shadows. The benchmark was run on high at 1920×1080 resolution.

Another standalone benchmark using actual in-game technologies is S.T.A.L.K.E.R:Call of Pripyat. Again utilizing DX11, we ran the benchmark on High, with Tessellation enabled and no MSAA, and a resolution of 1920×1080.

Last up for our testing, we chose Battlefield 3. As it remains one of the most popular games on the market at present, utilizing strong visuals with advanced physics, it is a choice that could be potentially taxing on both video cards and processors.

The video preset was set to high, and we chose the same campaign sequence that we did on previous tests: the ambush scene from the first real mission of the game, Operation Swordbreaker. Battlefield 3 has no built in benchmarking feature, so we utilized FRAPS to benchmark for us. Below is a video of the sequence used.