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

We were pleasantly surprised how well the game performed under DirectX 9.0 mode, as you will be able to enjoy the game on a single Radeon HD 3870 right the way up to 1920x1200 with shadows and post processing turned down to medium, while all other settings remained set to high. What was disappointing though was the lack of CrossFire support, as adding a second card into the fray resulted in no performance benefit.

Compared to the card it's replacing, it does no better, but at the same time does no worse than the Radeon HD 2900 XT in this title. However, as the Radeon HD 2900 XT has essentially been discontinued, the new Radeon's immediate competition comes from Nvidia's recently released GeForce 8800 GT 512M. Unfortunately for the Radeon, the 8800 GT is a faster card at all settings we tested under DirectX 9.0 mode. Additionally, the added bonus of SLI scaling being somewhere up near the 80 percent mark sweetens the deal for the 8800 GT -- that's a pretty impressive performance increase considering how new the title is.

DirectX 10

The performance hit under DirectX 10.0 mode is big enough to make the game unplayable at both 1920x1200 and 1680x1050 on a single Radeon HD 3870, and because CrossFire scaling isn't there yet, there's no benefit from adding a second card into the fray. On the other hand, you'll get just about playable performance at 1680x1050 on a single GeForce 8800 GT (a little bit of overclocking would make it a much smoother experience), while a pair of 8800 GTs manages to hold the fort right the way up to 1920x1200, such that there's even headroom to turn up a few more of the game's quality settings.