Foxconn MARS: God of War Performance?

Gaming Performance

As usual, gaming performance was tested with a variety of current games. We ran our benchmarks at a 1280x1024 resolution with high quality settings

Battlefield 2

This benchmark is performed using DICE's built-in demo playback functionality with additional capture capabilities designed in house. During the benchmark, the camera switches between players and vehicles in order to capture the most action possible. There is a significant amount of smoke, explosions, and vehicle usage as this a very GPU intensive Battlefield 2 benchmark. We run Battlefield 2 using medium quality graphics settings available in the video settings. The game itself is best experienced with average in-game frame rates of 35 and up.


Company of Heroes

Company of Heroes was released last year and is still proving to be a very addictive RTS game around the office. The game is extremely GPU intensive and also requires a hefty CPU at times. The game contains a built-in performance test that utilizes the game engine to generate several different action scenes. We find the performance test gives a good indication of how well your system will perform throughout the game on average. Some of the in-game action sequences can be more demanding than the performance test, however, and we are working on a repeatable game play benchmark. For now, we find the game to be enjoyable with an average frame rate score in the performance test above 35fps.


Prey

Prey offers some superb action sequences, unique weapons and characters, and is a visually stunning game at times. It still requires a very good GPU to run it with all of the eye candy turned on. We set all graphic settings to their maximum except for AA/AF and utilize a custom timedemo that takes place during one of the more action oriented sequences. We generally find the game to be enjoyable with an average frame rate above 35fps.


Supreme Commander

Supreme Commander is one of the favorite real time strategy games around the office as it continues to provide a great deal of replay value and the graphics are very good once the eye candy is turned on. What we especially like about the game is the fact that it can bring the best system to its knees and that fact makes it a great system benchmark. This particular game requires both a very good CPU and GPU when playing the game at anything above 1024x768 with decent settings. We utilize the game's built-in benchmark and generally find the game to be enjoyable with an average frame rate above 25fps.


Gaming Summary

The Foxconn MARS board performed admirably in the game tests although in the bandwidth sensitive Prey test it placed near the bottom of the group. Overall, the board continues its pattern of finishing in the middle of the pack. Considering the group of boards in the test group, this is actually an accomplishment for Foxconn.