BioShock Infinite Performance, Benchmarked

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Developed using a modified version of Unreal Engine 2.5 and enhanced with Havok Physics, we were blown away by the original BioShock when it launched back in September 2007. Our performance review at the time concluded that the title had "jaw-dropping visual effects" and that you'd need one of the finest graphics cards of the day if you intended on playing at 1920x1200 -- or even 1600x1200 for that matter.

Given our first impression with the first entry, we didn't hesitate to take BioShock 2 for a spin a couple years later. However, as is often the case, the second title was less of a technical showpiece. It also used a modified build of Unreal Engine 2.5 and looked similar to its predecessor with no major improvements. In turn, the game could be run on max quality at 1920x1200 with a relatively affordable graphics card.



Another three years having passed since BioShock 2 and the dawn of a new console generation on the horizon, BioShock Infinite has taken the opportunity to mix things up. Although it's still a first-person shooter published by 2K Games and contains similar concepts and themes, the third installment doesn't follow the same story, being set decades before the previous entries in a floating city called Columbia.

We won't be delving too deep into the gameplay side of things here, but critics seem to approve of the title's fresh perspective given its metascore of 95/100. Naturally, we're mostly interested in the graphics side of things today, and plenty has changed here, too. For starters, BioShock Infinite uses a DirectX 11-enabled, modified version of Unreal Engine 3, which gives hope of a quality PC port.

Along with DX11 effects, folks playing on PC can look forward to higher resolution textures and a healthy range of customization. Infinite comes with six graphical presets from "very low" to "ultra" that should hopefully cover a broad performance spectrum, not to mention individual control over settings like anti-aliasing, texture detail and filtering, dynamic shadows, post-processing, and so on.

As the cherry on top, the developer has fully embraced widescreen gaming with what it calls "horizontal plus" widescreen support, so the wider you go, the more you'll see of Columbia?s gorgeous vistas. In that same vein, it should be noted that there's also multi-monitor support for AMD Eyefinity, Nvidia Surround and Matrox TripleHead2Go. Plenty to see for sure, and we're eager to dig in.

Our test comprises 24 DirectX 11 graphics card configurations from AMD and Nvidia covering a wide range of prices, from the affordable to the ultra-expensive. The latest drivers have been used, and every card has been paired with an Intel Core i7-3960X to remove CPU bottlenecks that could influence high-end GPU scores.

The developer has included a benchmark tool that works very well as we found it to be an accurate representation of the kind of performance you can expect to see when playing BioShock Infinite.



While the benchmark allows to test all six quality presets, we decided to benchmark the Ultra preset with diffusion depth of field enabled. This is the maximum quality setting for BioShock Infinite which we tested at 1680x1050, 1920x1200 and 2560x1600.

Because we tested just a single quality preset and the benchmark tool streamlined the process, we had time to include frame time performance as well. Using Fraps in conjunction with the benchmark tool, we measured in milliseconds the time it takes to render each frame individually. These results will be displayed in our "99th Percentile Frame Time" graphs.
HIS Radeon HD 7970 GHz (3072MB)HIS Radeon HD 7970 (3072MB)HIS Radeon HD 7950 Boost (3072MB)HIS Radeon HD 7950 (3072MB)HIS Radeon HD 7870 (2048MB)HIS Radeon HD 7850 (2048MB)HIS Radeon HD 7770 (1024MB)HIS Radeon HD 7750 (1024MB)HIS Radeon HD 6970 (2048MB)HIS Radeon HD 6870 (1024MB)HIS Radeon HD 6850 (1024MB)HIS Radeon HD 6790 (1024MB)HIS Radeon HD 6770 (1024MB)HIS Radeon HD 6750 (1024MB)HIS Radeon HD 5870 (2048MB)Gigabyte GeForce GTX Titan (6144MB)Gigabyte GeForce GTX 680 (2048MB)Gigabyte GeForce GTX 670 (2048MB)Gainward GeForce GTX 660 Ti (2048MB)Gigabyte GeForce GTX 660 (2048MB)Gigabyte GeForce GTX 650 Ti (2048MB)Gigabyte GeForce GTX 580 (1536MB)Gigabyte GeForce GTX 560 Ti (1024MB)Gigabyte GeForce GTX 560 (1024MB)Gigabyte GeForce GTX 550 Ti (1024MB)Gigabyte GeForce GTX 480 (1536MB)Gigabyte GeForce GTX 460 (1024MB)Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition (3.30GHz)x4 4GB G.Skill DDR3-1600 (CAS 8-8-8-20)Gigabyte G1.Assassin2 (Intel X79)OCZ ZX Series 1250wCrucial m4 512GB (SATA 6Gb/s)Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 64-bitNvidia Forceware 314.22AMD Catalyst 13.3 (Beta 3)

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Crysis 3 Performance Test: Graphics & CPU

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Built with CryEngine2, the original Crysis raised the bar for PC gaming graphics in 2007 with the most stunningly detailed visuals that crippled even the fastest of the rigs. Looking back at our first Crysis performance article, which was based on the game's demo, the fastest GPU available at the time (the GeForce 8800 GTX 768 MB) struggled to average 30 fps when running at 1920 x 1200 with high quality settings is the DirectX 10.

Given how on "punishing the first game was, we were excited to explore the 2011 's CryEngine 3-based Crysis 2, but it was quickly apparent that the second installment wouldn't be a repeat performance. Not to say it didn't look better, but relative to Crytek's in the first title, the sequel didn't really set any new benchmarks. It was just another computer game that made great use of DX9, though DX11 was eventually patched in.

Fast forward two years and Crytek has given us another opportunity to hammer some hardware with the arrival of Crysis 2 this month. Like the second title, the third installment has been built with the CryEngine 3, though that doesn't mean you should expect lousy PC features, as the engine has been updated with improved dynamic cloth and vegetation, better lighting and shadows, and plenty more.


Plus, PC gamers won't have to wait for graphical extras. Crysis 3 launched with high resolution textures, DX11 support and plenty of customization options that set it apart from the diluted consoles builds. The result looks incredible and we get the feeling this will prove to be the game that folks who are heavily best-invested in multi-GPU setups have been waiting for. Here's hoping we aren't woefully disappointed.

We'll be testing 18 DirectX 11 graphics card configurations from AMD and Nvidia, which is considerably less than the 29 me tested for Far Cry 3 because even with the medium quality preset activated, there are almost no low-to high-end graphics cards that can play Crysis 3, even at 1680 x 1050.

The latest drivers will be used, and every card will be paired with an Intel Core i7-3960X to remove the CPU bottlenecks that could influence the high-end GPU scores.

We're using Fraps to measure frame rates during the 90 seconds of gameplay footage from Crysis 3 's in the first level, "Post Human". The test starts as soon as Michael "Psycho" Sykes hands you his backup weapon, we then simply follow the party leader until the time runs out.


We'll test in Crysis 3 at three common desktop display resolutions: 1680 x 1050, 1920 x 1200 and 2560 x 1600, using the DX11 mode. For the very high-quality test, we'll set the "overall quality" in the menu to the very high video quality while also setting the SMAA level to 1 (low). The high and medium-quality tests will also be conducted with SMAAx1 enabled.
Gigabyte Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition (3072 MB), Gigabyte Radeon HD 7970 (3072 MB), Gigabyte Radeon HD 7950 Boost (3072 MB), Gigabyte Radeon HD 7950 (3072 MB), AMD Radeon HD 7870 (2048MB) AMD Radeon HD 7850 (2048MB) of the HIS Radeon HD 7770 (1024 MB) of the HIS Radeon HD 69 (2048MB), Gigabyte GeForce GTX 680 (4096MB), Gigabyte GeForce GTX 680 (2048MB), Gigabyte GeForce GTX 670 (2048MB), Gainward GeForce GTX 660 Ti (2048MB), Gigabyte GeForce GTX 660 (2048MB), Gigabyte GeForce GTX 650 Ti (2048MB), Gigabyte GeForce GTX 580 (1536MB)The Gigabyte GeForce GTX 560 Ti (1024 MB) Nvidia GeForce GTX 480 (1536MB), Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition 3960X (3.30 GHz) x 4 4 GB g.skill DDR3-1600 (CAS 8-8-8-20), the Gigabyte G1.Assassin2 (Intel X 79) OCZ ZX Series 1250wCrucial m4 512 GB (SATA 6 GB/s), Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 64-bitNvidia Forceware 314.07 AMD Catalyst 8.2 (Beta 6)

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SimCity Performance, Benchmarked

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Going down the memory lane, I can remember two computer games being responsible for getting me so interested in PCs. The original Command & Conquer was the first around 1995. Running on the venerable MS-DOS, I spent quite a bit of time playing that game at the ripe old age of 9 on our pokey HP powered i486.

Shortly after that I discovered SimCity 2000. The first SimCity title, which was released back in 1989, was before my time so I never played or laid eyes on the original. At the time SimCity 2000 was incredible, it was extremely detailed and offered what seemed like endless hours of gameplay. Some five years later SimCity 3000 was released (1999) and again much of my childhood was spent playing it.

For reasons that I cannot recall I never got into SimCity 4 (2003). I know I played it but for some reason it just didn?t speak to me like the previous two titles. Then along came SimCity Societies and at that point I thought my days of enjoying the SimCity games were over and for the better part of a decade they were.

But when Maxis announced last year that a sixth installment in the SimCity franchise was coming the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. From the announcement, it looked to be a dramatic overhaul from previous titles featuring full 3d graphics, online multiplayer gameplay, a new engine as well as several new features and gameplay changes.

One year of waiting later, like so many others I pre-ordered the game and sat waiting for it to become available for download. Unfortunately like everyone else, once the game became available and I finally managed to download it, I wasn?t actually able to play.

As you've probably heard for the past couple of weeks, the game requires an internet connection to play, meaning there is no offline mode. That in itself is extremely annoying but it?s much worse when the servers you are meant to play on cannot cope with demand and shut you out.

It took me several days of trying, as did the thousands of outraged fans. Since we planned to test SimCity I really needed to get in and work out how we were going to test the game. Thankfully by Sunday things improved and for the next three days I set about building our test environment.

Normally when we benchmark a first person shooter, finding a good portion of the game to test with is simply a matter of playing through the game until we find a section that is rather demanding. This generally requires an hour or two of gameplay and then we get to test in full. It?s a similar process when we test real-time strategy games such as StarCraft II, for example. In that instance we chose to play a 4v4 game, record the replay and use that for benchmarking.

But with SimCity things were considerably more complex and time consuming. Because the game's progress is stored on EA servers it?s not possible to just download and use someone else?s saved game of a massive city. While it is possible to load up the leaderboard within SimCity, see who has the biggest city, and check it out, we couldn't use that for testing either since it's a live city being played, thus forever changing and hardly a controlled-enough test environment.

There are a few pre-built cities, such as the one used in the tutorial ?Summer Shoals? but with a population of less than 4000 it doesn?t exactly make for the most demanding test environment. Therefore we created a city that has a population of half a million sims with three more cities just like it on the map.

When testing StarCraft II some readers were upset that we tested using a large 8-player map, claiming that they only play 1v1 and therefore get better performance. That is fine, but we wanted to show what it took to play the game in its most demanding state so that you'd never run into performance issues.

Getting back to SimCity, it?s a slightly different situation as all the regions are the same size. Some maps have more regions than others, but they are all 2x2 kilometers (comparable to SimCity 4's medium size). For testing we loaded one of our custom created cities (the same one each time) and increased the game speed to maximum, as this is how I always play anyway. Once that was done, we started a 60 second test using Fraps and in that time zoomed in and out multiple times while scrolling around the city.

As usual we tested at three different resolutions: 1680x1050, 1920x1200 and 2560x1600. The game was tested using two quality configurations, which we are calling maximum and medium. Normally we would test three different quality settings, but there was virtually no difference between 'max' and 'high' so we scrapped the latter.
HIS Radeon HD 7970 GHz (3072MB)HIS Radeon HD 7970 (3072MB)HIS Radeon HD 7950 Boost (3072MB)HIS Radeon HD 7950 (3072MB)HIS Radeon HD 7870 (2048MB)HIS Radeon HD 7850 (2048MB)HIS Radeon HD 7770 (1024MB)HIS Radeon HD 7750 (1024MB)HIS Radeon HD 6970 (2048MB)HIS Radeon HD 6870 (1024MB)HIS Radeon HD 6850 (1024MB)HIS Radeon HD 6790 (1024MB)HIS Radeon HD 6770 (1024MB)HIS Radeon HD 6750 (1024MB)HIS Radeon HD 5870 (2048MB)Gigabyte GeForce GTX Titan (6144MB)Gigabyte GeForce GTX 680 (2048MB)Gigabyte GeForce GTX 670 (2048MB)Gainward GeForce GTX 660 Ti (2048MB)Gigabyte GeForce GTX 660 (2048MB)Gigabyte GeForce GTX 650 Ti (2048MB)Gigabyte GeForce GTX 580 (1536MB)Gigabyte GeForce GTX 560 Ti (1024MB)Gigabyte GeForce GTX 560 (1024MB)Gigabyte GeForce GTX 550 Ti (1024MB)Gigabyte GeForce GTX 480 (1536MB)Gigabyte GeForce GTX 460 (1024MB)Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition (3.30GHz)x4 4GB G.Skill DDR3-1600 (CAS 8-8-8-20)Gigabyte G1.Assassin2 (Intel X79)OCZ ZX Series 1250wCrucial m4 512GB (SATA 6Gb/s)Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 64-bitNvidia Forceware 314.14AMD Catalyst 13.2 (Beta 7)

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Tomb Raider Performance Test: Graphics & CPU

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Although this year's Tomb Raider reboot made our latest list of most anticipated PC games, I must admit that it was one of the games I was least looking forward to from a performance perspective. Previous titles in the franchise have received mixed to positive reviews, but gameplay aside, their visuals weren't exactly mind-blowing so we've never bothered doing a performance review on one -- until now, anyway.

As with the last few entries, Crystal Dynamics developed the new Tomb Raider 88 using the Crystal Engine -- albeit a heavily modified version. Being a multiplatform release, we were naturally worried about the game being geared toward consoles with PC being an afterthought, which has become increasingly common (Dead Space 3 comes to mind as a recent example) and generally results in lackluster graphics.

Those concerns were at least partially alleviated when we learned that the PC port was being worked on by Nixxes Software BV, the same folks who handled the PC versions of Hitman: Absolution and Deus Ex: Human Revolution, both of which were great examples of what we expect from decent ports in terms of graphical quality and customization. Hitman in particular really stressed our higher-end hardware.


We were also relieved to learn that Tomb Raider supports DirectX 11, which brings access to rendering technologies such as depth of field, high definition ambient occlusion, hardware tessellation, super-sample anti-aliasing and contact-hardening shadows. Additionally, compared to the diluted console versions, the PC build offers better textures as well as AMD's TressFX real-time hair physics system.

The result should be a spectacular looking game that pushes the limits of today's enthusiast hardware -- key word being "should," of course -- so let's move on and see what the Tomb Raider reboot is made of.

We'll be testing 27 DirectX 11 graphics card configurations from AMD and Nvidia covering a wide range of prices from the affordable to the ultra-expensive. The latest drivers will be used, and every card will be paired with an Intel Core i7-3960X to remove CPU bottlenecks that could influence high-end GPU scores.

We're using Fraps to measure frame rates during 90 seconds of gameplay footage from Tomb Raider?s first level, the checkpoint is called "Stun." The test begins with Lara running to escape from a cave system.


Our Fraps test ends just before Lara exits the cave, which is ironically where the built-in benchmark begins. We decided to test a custom section of the game rather than the stock benchmark because this is how we will test Tomb Raider in the future when reviewing new graphics cards. Using Fraps also allows us to record frame latency performance, though for this particular article we didn't include those.

Frame timings weren't included for two reasons: it's not easy to display all that data when testing 27 different GPUs, and we feel Nvidia needs more time to improve their drivers. We'll include frame time performance for Tomb Raider in our next GPU review.

We'll test Tomb Raider at three common desktop display resolutions: 1680x1050, 1920x1200 and 2560x1600 using DX11. We are also testing using the three top quality presets that includes Ultimate, Ultra and High. No changes will be made to the presets.
HIS Radeon HD 7970 GHz (3072MB)HIS Radeon HD 7970 (3072MB)HIS Radeon HD 7950 Boost (3072MB)HIS Radeon HD 7950 (3072MB)HIS Radeon HD 7870 (2048MB)HIS Radeon HD 7850 (2048MB)HIS Radeon HD 7770 (1024MB)HIS Radeon HD 7750 (1024MB)HIS Radeon HD 6970 (2048MB)HIS Radeon HD 6870 (1024MB)HIS Radeon HD 6850 (1024MB)HIS Radeon HD 6790 (1024MB)HIS Radeon HD 6770 (1024MB)HIS Radeon HD 6750 (1024MB)HIS Radeon HD 5870 (2048MB)Gigabyte GeForce GTX Titan (6144MB)Gigabyte GeForce GTX 680 (2048MB)Gigabyte GeForce GTX 670 (2048MB)Gainward GeForce GTX 660 Ti (2048MB)Gigabyte GeForce GTX 660 (2048MB)Gigabyte GeForce GTX 650 Ti (2048MB)Gigabyte GeForce GTX 580 (1536MB)Gigabyte GeForce GTX 560 Ti (1024MB)Gigabyte GeForce GTX 560 (1024MB)Gigabyte GeForce GTX 550 Ti (1024MB)Gigabyte GeForce GTX 480 (1536MB)Gigabyte GeForce GTX 460 (1024MB)Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition (3.30GHz)x4 4GB G.Skill DDR3-1600 (CAS 8-8-8-20)Gigabyte G1.Assassin2 (Intel X79)OCZ ZX Series 1250wCrucial m4 512GB (SATA 6Gb/s)Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 64-bitNvidia Forceware 314.14AMD Catalyst 13.2 (Beta 7)

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