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.








In Crysis' DirectX 10 mode, you'll find that even at 1,280 x 1,024 with 0xAA 0xAF enabled, the Radeon HD 4830 struggles to achieve comfortably playable frame rates - it's possible to play the game at this resolution with all details set to high, but it's unlikely to be a stellar experience. You'll have more fun once you've lowered some of the in-game quality settings to reduce the load on the graphics card.

In terms of comparable performance, the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT delivers a more palatable and smooth experience at 1,280 x 1,024 0xAA 0xAF. We'd still like to see higher frame rates to remove some of the choppiness, so we would recommend lowering a few of the settings to medium in order to obtain better frame rates, but you'll find you have to disable less to achieve the same frame rate.

Compared to the Radeon HD 4850, the 4830 is around 20 percent slower at 1,280 x 1,024 0xAA 0xAF and also maintains respectably playable frame rates when 2xAA is enabled at the same resolution. Sadly, if you want to play Crysis at 1,680 x 1,050, you'll need to start lowering some of the in-game settings on even the Radeon HD 4850 - it's just not fast enough to handle the load Crysis throws at it.