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.

In addition to testing under both DirectX 9.0 and DirectX 10 with all quality details set to High, we feel it's about time hardware should be able to handle the game with the in-game settings tuned to Very High. The game has been out for at least a year now, so it's time for hardware manufacturers to catch up with the software.

We forced 8x anisotropic filtering in the driver menu as there is currently no support for it in game and 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 in conjunction with Very High quality in-game settings, we'll be pushing even the bleeding edge hardware on test to the limit.









Despite Crysis at very high being one of the most demanding graphics tests we can throw at a card, the GeForce GTX 295 is able to produce some simply stunning results at 1,280 x 1,024 and 1,680 x 1,050, smashing the 4870 X2's performance by a clear fifteen frames per second in some circumstances. While the gap does close as the resolution and anti aliasing settings climb, the GTX 295 never surrenders its lead (although it does become incredibly slim at 2,560 x 1,600).

SLI GeForce GTX 295 performance is just as impressive, offering incredible scaling right from the lowest resolution that easily sees off the challenge from ATI's Radeon HD 4870 X2 until 2,560 x 1,600 where the 4870 X2 in CrossFire is finally able to snatch the lead, albeit by the narrowest of margins. Nvidia said that it can achieve much higher scaling at 2,560 x 1,600 with a pair of GeForce GTX 295s, as memory usage isn't as optimised as it could be, we're told.

The company gave us some instructions to improve performance, but they didn't arrive before we jumped on a flight to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show. We've pasted them below and these shouldn't be required when Nvidia fixes the problem in its driver.

1) Create a file called (autoexec.cfg) and put it in your Game folder in Crysis root directory. For me it looks like this (C:\Program Files (x86)\Electronic Arts\Crytek\Crysis\Game)

2)you will need to edit this file with notepad.

3)Now paste in these commands

con_restricted=0
r_DynTexMaxSize=130

Now save the file and make sure its still a .cfg file.