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 both DirectX 9.0 and DirectX 10 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. 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.










The GeForce GTX 280 again has an advantage over the Radeon HD 4850 X2 at lower resolutions, but as soon as you get to 1,920 x 1,200 it outperforms Nvidia’s flagship graphics card. AMD’s flagship card, on the other hand, has a clear lead in this title with high in-game settings and even manages to achieve a playable frame rate at 2,560 x 1,600 0xAA 8xAF.

Moving further down, the GTX 260+ is faster than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB by a considerable margin at some resolutions but at 1,920 x 1,200 in particular the two are on even footing. The same is true with the battle between the Radeon HD 4850 and GeForce 9800 GTX+ as well – the latter is faster at the resolutions that matter, but once the frame rate dips below the playability threshold the two are fairly evenly matched.