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 last year and was released on November 16th 2007.

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 1.2 patch applied. We used a custom timedemo recorded on the Harbor map 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 30-33 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, we set Texture Detail, Shadows Quality, Physics Quality, Shaders Quality and Water Quality to High, while all other settings were set to medium. Because of how intense the game is, we tested with both anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering disabled at resolutions above 1280x1024 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.

ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2

Under DirectX 9.0 mode, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 doesn't really gain anything in terms of performance, but then it doesn't really lose anything either - all of the recorded results are within reasonable experimental error. When you move to DirectX 10 though, there are some small average frame rate increases to be had, but this comes at the expense of the minimum frame rates which unfortunately dropped by a few frames per second.

Nvidia GeForce 9800 GX2

The GeForce 9800 GX2, on the other hand, displayed small frame rate increases across the board in both DirectX 9.0 and DirectX 10 scenarios, although we were hard pushed to notice the differences in real gameplay scenarios.