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 DirectX 10 mode 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.








Crysis run with Very High detail settings doesn't care one jot for the extra 1GB of memory of the Sapphire Vapor-X. Our benchmark enables the dev console, which constantly showed memory use as being up to - but never exceeding - 1GB. The frame rates of the Sapphire Vapor-X and the 1GB HD 4870 are so similar that you might be forgiven for thinking we'd not bothered to run the benchmarks at all, but we swear we have.

How else can we explain the massive [/sarcasm] difference in frame rate between the two cards at 1,680 x 1,050 with 0x AA (the Vapor-X shows as having a 1fps higher minimum) and at 1,920 x 1,200 with 0x AA (the Vapor-X has a 0.4fps higher average). Those are margin of error numbers that you just can't make up!

As the Sapphire Vapor-X costs around £220, it's also worth comparing it the HD 4890 and the Nvidia GeForce GTX 275. Crysis has always favoured G80, G92 and GT200 GPUs over ATI designs, so it's no surprise to see the GTX 275 beat the Sapphire Vapor-X at every resolution - comfortably so at the lower resolutions.