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 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 at 1,680 x 1,050 using 0xAA and 0xAF.




The consistent results are that the Core i7 board yields a higher minimum frame rate, and in both multi-GPU environments the two x16 lanes make a few frames per second difference in its favour too again the older Core 2 Quad and latest Lynnfield systems. With a single PCI-Express card there's very little difference between Lynnfield and Core i7 though - the on-die PCI-Express balances out against the extra channel of memory bandwidth.

Lynnfield stretches a constant lead over an equivalent Core 2 Quad with a single GPU though, it clearly delivers faster average and minimum frame rates.