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 30-33 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 1280x1024, using 0x, 2x and 4x Anti Aliasing, 1680x1050 using 0x and 4x Anti Aliasing and 1920x1200 using 0x and 2xAA. By extensively testing using Anti Aliasing in very high resolutions, we'll be pushing even the bleeding edge hardware on test to the limit.

DirectX 10

Frankly, we’ve never seen a graphics card chew through Crysis in quite the same way as the Radeon HD 4870 X2 – this card is smoking fast! When AA is enabled at both 1,280 x 1,024 and 1,680 x 1,050, there is clear daylight between AMD’s latest and greatest and the rest of the pack – the same can be said about the card at 1,920 x 1,200 0xAA 16xAF as well.

Interestingly, the closest Nvidia gets to the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is at 1,920 x 1,200 2xAA 16xAF, where the GeForce GTX 280 is only about 3.5 percent slower than the new AMD screamer.