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.










Blimey! The Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 Atomic makes no bones about its performance advantage over the stock clocked version of the 4890, offering massively improved average and minimum frame rates in at all resolutions and anti-aliasing settings. While this big improvement sadly still isn't enough to beat the GTX 275 at lower resolutions, the Atomic does narrowly better the GTX 275 at both 1,920 x 1,200 and 2,560 x 1,600. Considering that, historically, Nvidia's cards have the edge in Crysis, this is something of a coup for Sapphire and really shows how much faster this card is in comparison to a stock HD 4890.