First-Person Game Benchmarks
First Person shooters are amongst the most popular genres and we are working towards having a good mix of older and newer titles. We want a good balance between age and vendor optimisation (NVIDIA The Way Its Meant to Be Played and AMD Gaming Evolved.
We have kept the exceptionally popular Battlefield 3 for our follow-up rather than this overview as there is specific scaling issues to discuss.
AvP is a known AMD centric Direct11 test dating to the Radeon HD 5800/Cypress era. It plays back an Alien Xeno morph infestation scene typical of the game.
We get an OK result here on Intel Relative to NVIDIA which itself doesn't score too well either.
Using Bioshock's built in benchmark to compare worst case performance; Intel does around 1/3 of the performance of the three year old GTX460. Newer mid-range cards such as the Kepler based 660 and GCN based 7850 do much better at the price point than the 'older' Fermi based 460. Bioshock is part of AMD's gaming evolved program and Intel themselves promote it as an ideal title for HD Graphics but at lower details.
We use Crysis 1 for several specific reasons. It has a built in benchmark which can be repeatable on different systems and to answer "can it run Crysis?" At our settings, the answer is definitely no.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution is also an AMD Gaming evolved title, worked on by AMD favourite Nixxes studio. With MLAA, less than half is reasonable for Intel and may be acceptable for some gamers in slow paced sections of the title unless in a busy fire fight. This also applies to the notebook experience.
The original Metro 2033, an NVIDIA logoed title is hard on GPUs like Batman: AC so we run tests at lower details. While we see a significant improvement for the gaming class GPU, this doesn't scale as well for Intel even though it's DirectX9.
Metro2033 is now a very cheap if not free game with promo codes available through a number of retail or social media outlets so there will be a segment of users trying to play this solely on integrated graphics. We test with Depth of Field enabled which takes a big hit on discrete GPUs, up to 10FPS on some models
See Part2 of our Haswell coverage for Complete Battlefield 3 and Bioshock scaling with different resolutions and detail levels.