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 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.

For our testing, we set all quality 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 4x anti-aliasing, 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, we'll be pushing even the bleeding edge hardware on test to the limit.










As one would expect, the Zotac GeForce GTX 260 AMP²! Edition graphics card performs very well in Crysis' DirectX 10 mode - it's roughly as fast, but overall a little slower than BFG Tech's equivalent product because of its lower core, shader and memory clocks. However, it's still much faster than the competition from AMD - the Radeon HD 4870 1GB is anywhere from ten to 25 percent slower than the Zotac, depending on the resolution and settings you desire.

What's more, the Zotac GTX 260 AMP²! delivers playable frame rates at higher settings than the 4870 1GB - 1,680 x 1,050 4xAA is just about playable on the latter, while the former finds those same settings a breeze. Both are able to hit respectable frame rates at 1,920 x 1,200 0xAA, but then when 2xAA is applied, the Zotac remains playable, while the 4870 1GB does not.