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 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.

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










As it did with Crysis at very high, the GeForce GTX 295 is again able to produce some incredible results in the game with high details, even able to outperform two 4870 X2s at 1,280 x 1,024 with 0xAA, but that's not why you'd buy a GeForce GTX 295 though. Instead, moving up to more demanding resolutions and AA settings the GeForce GTX 295 is able to comfortably outperform the 4870 X2 at every turn, with ATI's dual GPU card only able to take the lead when AA is enabled at the maximum supported resolution of 2,560 x 1,600.

Looking to our Quad SLI testing and once again the incredible scaling we saw in the very high tests is apparent, with two GTX 295s providing almost a seventy percent increase in performance in some situations. However, at 2,560 x 1,600 with 2xAA the quad SLI driver obviously still needs some work, as performance drops to less than that of a single GTX 295. Nvidia reckons it can fix that deficit though (see the previous page) - we'll be testing this out at a later date.