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 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.

For our testing, we set all quality 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 4x anti-aliasing, 1,920 x 1,200 using 0x and 2xAA and 2,560 x 1,600 with 0xAA. By extensively testing using anti-aliasing in very high resolutions, we'll be pushing even the bleeding edge hardware on test to the limit.








There's a similar story in DirectX 9.0 mode as well, where the biggest gains are seen when 4xAA is applied. As with DirectX 10 mode, the biggest performance increase we saw as a result of the additional frame buffer was at 1,680 x 1,050 4xAA 8xAF. At these settings, the performance difference was 7.5 percent.

Despite this, you could argue that the game was playable on both cards at these settings, so the benefit isn't quite as profound as it was in DirectX 10 mode. However, what we will say is that the while the difference is small, there will be a notable improvement in the smoothness of gameplay - there should be fewer choppy points where the system is trying to make up for a lack of video memory.

Again, Crysis DirectX 9.0 favours Nvidia's hardware ever so slightly, although probably more so here than in DirectX 10 mode. The GeForce GTX 260 manages to outperform the competition from AMD in scenarios that were less favourable to Nvidia's hardware in our DirectX 10 Crysis tests on the previous page.