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.

In addition to testing under both DirectX 9.0 and DirectX 10 with all quality details set to High, we feel it's about time hardware should be able to handle the game with the in-game settings tuned to Very High. The game has been out for at least a year now, so it's time for hardware manufacturers to catch up with the software.

We forced 8x anisotropic filtering in the driver menu as there is currently no support for it in game and 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 in conjunction with Very High quality in-game settings, we'll be pushing even the bleeding edge hardware on test to the limit.








Running Crysis with very high in-game quality settings is an arduous task for even a dual-GPU graphics card like the Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2 2GB. We only manage to achieve frame rates above 30 frames per second at 1,280 x 1,024 and at 1,680 x 1,050 0xAA 16xAF, the average is sub 30 fps, but still above our 27 fps playability threshold.

Sadly for the 4850 X2 though, Nvidia's GeForce GTX 285 delivers frame rates above 30 frames per second at 1,680 x 1,050 0xAA 16xAF and is almost eight percent faster than Sapphire's card at this resolution.