Batman: Arkham Asylum
The Dark Knight takes on his greatest challenge yet when he becomes trapped with all of his most dangerous villains inside the insane asylum of Gotham City - Arkham Asylum. The game exposes you to a unique, dark and atmospheric adventure that takes you to the depths of Arkham Asylum, Gotham's psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane.
With the settings on very high and only 2xAA Batman: Arkham Asylum gave an average of 99 frames per second which is quite impressive for a budget gaming system. Upping the AA to 8x did cause the frame rate to drop a fair bit but with an average of 55 FPS the game is still perfectly playable.
Batman: Arkham Asylum is well known of its Physx effects and when an NVIDIA GPU is not present any Physx will run on the CPU. This causes a major performance hit as Physx is not designed to run on CPUs. This can be seen in the Physx test with only 2xAA where the average frame rate dropped from 99 to an unplayable 18.
Far Cry 2
One of the most hyped games of 2008, Far Cry 2 had some big shoes to fill. It was built to be the next best thing since well... Far Cry I suppose. Combining an open-world game play with highly detailed graphics, physics and AI, what more could we possibly want? The game puts us in the body of a malaria inflicted mercenary hunting down the "Jackal" in the heart of Africa, in a bid to stop an ongoing conflict between two rival factions. The storyline can be hard to follow sometimes but this is no game review, so let's concentrate on the graphics and performance. After all, we all need to know if our hardware will be able to handle the scorching savannah burning at the hands of our flamethrowers.
Running the benchmark in DX10 mode, the settings at high and 0xAA the Cobra performed fairly well. Changing the settings to very high with 2xAA reduces the average frame rate by just over 13 FPS while still remaining playable. Putting the settings to Ultra and 8xAA causes a fairly large drop but the game was on the main smooth enough to play.
Just Cause 2
The sandbox-style action game returns with you playing as protagonist Rico Rodriguez again. Set on the other side of the world to Just Cause 1, Rico is in Panau, Southeast Asia aiming to overthrow the dictator of Panau and confront his former mentor. With a 400 square mile map to free roam in and varied terrain of desert to alpine to rainforest there is plenty to see and do in Just Cause 2!
On default settings the game is reasonably smooth and similar can be said for optimal settings. But with all options on their highest setting the game did creep towards the non-smooth area with an average frame rate of just over 24 FPS.
