Crysis

Publisher: Electronic Arts

What can we say about this game that hasn’t been said already? Crysis was 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 1.21 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 30 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.

For our testing, we set all quality details to medium except for sound detail, shader detail and texture detail, which were all set to high. We also 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 and 4x anti-aliasing and 1,680 x 1,050 using 0x and 2x anti-aliasing. By testing at reasonably high detail levels and with anti aliasing, but at lower resolutions, these tests will give a sound idea of performance on the systems these cards are currently targeted at.






All of these mid-range cards struggle at the wrath of Crysis' DirectX 10 mode and only XFX's GeForce 9600 GSO XXX Edition shows any real signs of playability. 1,280 x 1,024 with 0xAA is very playable with an average frame rate of 30 frames per second, while 1,680 x 1,050 with 0xAA isn't at the settings we've tested, but we're sure that it'd achieve playability with shader quality dropped from high to medium.

AMD's ATI Radeon HD 4670 is quite a bit slower than XFX's supercharged 9600 GSO, and so DirectX 10 mode is generally something you'd want to avoid with it. Anti-aliasing is also a no-go for all cards tested here - the performance hit is just too great for it to be viable as you'll have to sacrifice a lot of the graphics fidelity to get the frame rate high enough.