Crysis

Publisher: Electronic Arts

What can we say about this game that hasn’t been said already? Crysis was probably the most anticipated game on the PC last year and was released on November 16th 2007.

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 both DirectX 9.0 and 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 30 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.

For our testing, we set all quality details to medium except for sound detail, shader detail and texture detail, which were all set to high. We also 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 and 4x anti-aliasing and 1,680 x 1,050 using 0x and 2x anti-aliasing. By testing at reasonably high detail levels and with anti aliasing, but at lower resolutions, these tests will give a sound idea of performance on the systems these cards are currently targeted at.






Crysis in DirectX 10 mode is pretty brutal on all of these cards - only 1,280 x 1,024 shows any signs of playability; at higher resolutions you'll want to start disabling image quality options, that's for sure. The Radeon HD 4670 puts itself in between the Radeon HD 3870 and Radeon HD 3850--even when AA is enabled. That's a pretty impressive performance feat for a card of this calibre.

Having said that, if XFX's card hits the price we've been told, it looks like a better value in Crysis. It's currently quite a bit more expensive than the Radeon HD 4670 though, so one could argue there's no true competition from Nvidia against AMD's new card - those that are more expensive than it are faster and the 9500 GT, which is a little cheaper, is slower - and by quite a margin. You'd be wasting your money if you opted for the 9500 GT today - no irony was intended there, especially since I'm the stupid mug that bought one.