Crysis

Publisher: Electronic Arts

We tested the game using the 64-bit executable under and DirectX 10 with the 1.21 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.

For our testing, we set all the settings to High. Because of how intense the game is, we tested with both anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering disabled at resolutions above 1,680 x 1,050 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.


Crysis sees a single frame per second jump from the extra 100MHz and two more frames per second from a few hundred more MHz after overclocking - that's not a huge jump by any means. The overclocked E5200 at 4GHz still trounces the lot by several fps as well.

Far Cry 2

Publisher: Ubisoft

Far Cry 2 is the latest first person shooter from Ubisoft, and while it continues the Far Cry franchise that Crytek started in 2004, this game is built on its own in-house engine and has no association - other than its name - to anything Crytek has worked on or is working on now.

The game uses DirectX 10.1 to improve anti-aliasing performance and quality. The improvements are made by reading the multisampled depth buffer in a single pass - something that was only introduced officially with DirectX 10.1. However, Ubisoft has also made the enhancements available to Nvidia hardware as well through a DirectX 10 extension.

We used a retail version of the game and the in-built gameplay demo set to Ultra-Very High settings under DirectX 10.


Much like with Crysis, Far Cry 2 has a marginal progressive improvement as a result of the increased clock speed - the minimums nicely improve, but ultimately the Black Editions are left behind by the potential of the Intel Pentium Dual Core E5200.