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).

On this program the on-board video from ECS A785GM-M achieved the same performance as the on-board video from Sapphire PI-AM2RS780G (AMD 780G). Here Biostar TA785GE 128M (AMD 785G with 128 MB) was 5.04% faster and ECS A790GXM-A (AMD 790GX with 128 MB) was 28.57% faster than the reviewed motherboard.

A Radeon HD 3450 with 64-bit interface achieved a performance 15.13% higher than the on-board video from ECS A785GM-M and enabling Hybrid CrossFire mode improved performance by 96.64% compared to the on-board video alone and by 70.80% compared to the Radeon HD 3450 alone.

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.