We ran this benchmarking tool at 1024x768 setting all image quality settings to their lowest values. Although this program supports DirectX 10 rendering, for some reason this option didn’t work with us, so we used this program to benchmark DirectX 9.0c performance. The results below are in frames per second (FPS).

The on-board 128 MB video memory helped Biostar TA785GE 128M to achieve a performance 5.04% higher than Sapphire PI-AM2RS780G (AMD 780G) and ECS A785GM-M (AMD 785G). Here ECS A790GXM-A (AMD 790GX with 128 MB) was 22.40% faster than the reviewed motherboard.

Adding a Radeon HD 3450 improved performance by 9.60% and configuring in CrossFire mode with the on-board video made performance to almost double (93.60% increase).

However Tropics is a “heavy” simulation. As you can see the frame rates achieved by all motherboards were way below 30 FPS, meaning that playing a game based on an engine like this one using on-board video is close to impossible.