Gaming benchmarks
Gaming
Far Cry
Far Cry is run with identical settings on all GPUs. We immediately see the strangling effects of HyperMemory when system RAM bandwidth is transferred over a x1 PCIe bus in the test. Far Cry isn't really playable at 1024x768, and that's with no further image enhancement.
Quake 4
Quake 4 is run with identical settings on both discrete cards (medium quality) but with bump maps and shadows disabled for onboard graphics, so it's run at a lower-quality setting. Even so, the HIS X1300 x1 PCIe card is over twice as fast as integrated graphics at both 1024x768 and 1280x1024, However, it benchmarks at around half the speed of a Radeon X1300 Pro equipped with a dedicated 256MiB framebuffer and x16 PCIe connectivity. Quake 4 doesn't produce playable framerates in our low-end test at either 1024x768 or 1280x1024 resolutions, we feel.
Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory
Again, as mentioned on the previous page, both discrete cards are run with the same low-end settings but integrated X300-class graphics on the ECS mainboard are set to the lowest quality possible, such that users will be able to play the game. The result is unplayable framerates from the HIS X1300 x1 PCIe card; there's simply not enough grunt to tackle the trio of games at low-resolution and low-quality settings. Still, it performs better than integrated graphics.
