Crysis

Publisher: Electronic Arts

What can we say about this game that hasn’t been said already? Crysis is probably the most anticipated game on the PC this year and was released on November 16th.

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 under both DirectX 9.0 and DirectX 10 using a custom timedemo and is more representative of gameplay than the built-in benchmark, which renders things much faster than you’re going to experience in game. We found that around 25 fps in our 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 under DirectX 9.0, we set most of the in-game settings to high, with the only exceptions to this rule being shadow quality and post processing quality, which were dropped to medium quality. For DirectX 10 testing, we set shader quality to 'very high', while all other settings remained the same as what they were set to for our DX9 performance testing. Because of how intense the game is, we tested with both anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering disabled for the time being. There is currently no support for anisotropic filtering in the game, but you can still force it from the driver control panel.

DirectX 9.0

DirectX 10

There is no denying that the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB card is an impressive performer in Crysis—both under DirectX 9.0 and DirectX 10 codepaths—where it is neck and neck with Nvidia’s GeForce 8800 GTX card. Under DirectX 9.0, Nvidia’s new part is a faster graphics card than the 8800 GTX, albeit only slightly, and as the resolution increases the performance gap gets smaller – this is a sign that the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB is starved of memory bandwidth a little at higher resolutions.

Under DirectX 10, this trend becomes more apparent, as it generally delivers the same performance as the 8800 GTX across the board, rather than being slightly faster at lower resolutions as it was in our DirectX 9.0 tests in Crysis.