Crysis

Publisher: Electronic Arts

We tested the game using the 64-bit executable under and DirectX 10 with the 1.21 patch applied. We used a custom timedemo recorded on the Harbor map which is more representative of gameplay than the built-in benchmark that renders things much faster than you're going to experience in game.

For our testing, we set all the settings to High. Because of how intense the game is, we tested with both anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering disabled at resolutions above 1680x1050 for the time being. There is currently no support for anisotropic filtering in the game, but you can still force it from the driver control panel.



Increasing the CPU memory core clock does a little at first then tails off into nothing, and the memory performance increments are generally positive with increasing frequency and decreasing latency, but there are a few out of line results - mostly due to test variance. There's nowhere near a noteable difference for increasing the memory performance in a Core i7 system - the bottleneck is elsewhere for Crysis, and pushing the memory too far seems to have adverse results as well.

Far Cry 2

Publisher: Ubisoft

Far Cry 2 is the latest first person shooter from Ubisoft, and while it continues the Far Cry franchise that Crytek started in 2004, this game is built on its own in-house engine and has no association - other than its name - to anything Crytek has worked on or is working on now. We used a retail version of the game patched to version 1.02, and used the in-built "Action" gameplay demo set to Ultra-Very High settings under DirectX 10.



To an even lesser degree, memory performance does little to enhance performance in Far Cry 2, whereas CPU memory controller frequency does nothing more than mere fractions of a frame per second - a difference that's well within test run variances. Top to bottom of this table is a single frame per second, and while the faster memory speeds do come out on top, again, pushing the memory too far has an adverse effect on the result.