Crysis

Publisher: Electronic Arts

Crysis is seen by many as the poster boy for DirectX 10 and it will make your system cry, quite literally – it’s a monster! It doesn’t come as much of a surprise then, that the graphics are something special – they’re above and beyond anything we’ve ever seen in a PC game.

We tested the game using the 64-bit executable under DirectX 10 mode with the 1.21 patch applied. We used a custom timedemo recorded from the Laws of Nature level which is more representative of gameplay than the built-in benchmark that renders things much faster than you're going to experience in game. We found that around 27-33 fps in our custom timedemo was sufficient enough to obtain a playable frame rate through the game. It's a little different to other games in that the low frame rates still appear to be quite smooth.

We set all of the in-game details to High and forced 8x anisotropic filtering in the driver menu as there is currently no support for it in game. We tested at 1,280 x 1,024, using 0x, 2x and 4x anti-aliasing, 1,680 x 1,050 using 0x and 4xAA, 1,920 x 1,200 using 0x and 2xAA and 2,560 x 1,600 with 0xAA and 2xAA. By extensively testing using anti-aliasing in very high resolutions in conjunction to Very High quality, we'll be pushing even the bleeding edge hardware on test to the limit.









While fortune favours the brave, Crysis favours the GeForce GTX 275. The Radeon HD 4890 is consistently a few fps slower than the Nvidia card, which is a shame for ATI considering that its card costs the same, but is louder and produces considerably more heat. In the mid-range resolution and detail settings, the domination of the GTX 275 over the HD 4890 is clear. Take 1,680 x 1,050 with no AA for example, the GTX 275 sails through the game with a minimum of 27fps and an average of 44.3fps. Meanwhile, the HD 4890 is struggling to play the game smoothly at all, with a stuttery minimum of 21fps and a mediocre average of 35.6fps.

In fact, the GTX 275 is so good in Crysis, that it rivals the performance of the £300 or so GeForce GTX 285. That's £80 extra for around 1fps extra of performance? You'd be a fool to spend more than £200 unless you are running a really high resolution monitor. Only at the high resolutions does the slightly fatter memory interface of the GTX 285 give it a bit more of an edge over the GTX 275, but even then it's only by a couple more fps at most.