Section IV Performance – Gaming
Gaming as a test of motherboard performance is sort of a joke these days. The big player in the gaming arena is the GPU. Everyone but a few hardcore PR teams know this. However, it is important to run at least a few (one from each current DX version) to see if there are any issues with the combination of components on a motherboard. These are items like Audio lag, memory lag and of course problems with the PCIe lanes and signal traces. If there are issues in design, drivers or BIOS then you can have odd gaming performance. So without much more preamble let’s dive into the three games we currently use; Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 for DX9 FarCry 2 for DX10 and Battlefield Bad Company 2 for DX11.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 DX9 -
This is an excellent but short game that put you right into the action from the beginning and does not let up the pressure until the very end. The graphics are a little better; most notably the night and thermal imaging have been improved. The AI is still the typical COD “bar fight” style AI, with maybe a tad more finesse. All in all it is not a bad game to play and a decent one to use for testing. Our testing run starts at the bridge and ends after you clear the school in the first level of the game. Settings are shown below as are the performance numbers.

The 990FXA-UD5 can hold its own under our DX9 testing (and with the hardware we have in the board). It is not the fastest, but we are still seeing minimum frame rates of over 80. This means that you will still have a good gaming experience with it.

FarCry2 DX10 -
Although not one of my favorite games this tedious game does have some good graphics. The large sandbox style of the game lends to mission based play. The only problem is that the AI is rather low grade. Still the more CPU power the more the bad guys try to do. Over all the game was a little bit of a disappointment to play, but still not a bad DX10 representation. Our testing run starts right after you get your first mission to clean out the safe-house and ends after the hostage rescue. Settings and performance numbers are shown below.

The 990FXA-UD5 was a little disappointing with FarCry2. It only managed to hit 37FPS minimum. Granted this is over our 32FPS mark for full fluid gaming, but we are also looking at other AMD boards getting 40 and 43FPS and these are a generation or more behind this product.

Battlefield Bad Company2 DX11 –
I have liked many of the Battlefield games. They usually tend to be fast paced and fun. With Battlefield Bad Company 2 you do get some of that, but there is something about the graphics and the movement that just does not sit right. The AI is a less sophisticated form of the bar fight AI, but it gets the job done. Still, the game is good for testing as it can put a strain on the components of the board. Out testing run is the entire first level, from beginning to end. Settings are shown below along with the raw numbers.

In Bad Company 2 the 990FXA-UD5 redeems itself somewhat. Here we find it in the middle of the pack on a DX11 game that is fairly recent and also can be hard on a system.

Gaming wrap-up -
Gaming on the Gigabyte 990FXA-UD5 was sort of hit and miss. We saw decent performance on our DX9 game (although near the bottom of the list), relatively poor performance on the DX10 test and fairly solid performance for DX11. I think that AMD has some drivers to work on in addition to Gigabyte needing to tweak the BIOS a little to deal with what appears to be memory issues. On the other had the audio performance (as we mentioned earlier) was very solid. We had no audio anomalies while the sound was full and pretty balanced for an onboard CODEC.