Graphics

There’s two things you need to know before we go any further. First, that odd clunking sound that you heard at the start of the review was the sound on my jaw hitting the floor when I first booted up Crysis – bought to you through the magnificence of Web 2.0.

The second is that you might want to go get some food and drink now and bring it to your PC so you’re nicely prepared. It’s OK, we’ll wait for you and trust us, you’ll need some provisions. This is going to be a big’un.

If Crysis was sold to gamers on anything then it would be the graphics. A vast number of members in our community have been upgrading their systems over the past few months in order to get ready for Crysis purely so they can play it in all its true glory.

Crysis comes with a custom built graphics engine and physics engine. We met with Ageia a while back and the company's reps told us the truth; the fellows at Crytek took a good long look at both the Havoc and Ageia physics engines before coming to the decision that neither of them did what they wanted them to. So, the developer built its own physics engine. Crytek is one of the few companies in the world which has the resources to do something like that, next to the likes of Ubisoft and Valve.


The problem is that the game demands a lot from a system and, if you want to see the best of the physics, then you’ll want to be running something pretty high-end. The physics system is run on the CPU obviously and is mercifully optimised for multiple cores, so you’ll need a quad-core to see the really good stuff. Our testing though showed that the physics could get by on a dual-core too though if you pushed the quality back to Medium. Medium physics quality is perfectly passable for most people, though you may miss out on a few of the more complex effects – when watchtowers collapse under a rocket, for example.

If you aren’t sure if your system will run Crysis with all the bells and whistles then the chances are that it won’t though. You’ll need a powerful rig just to reach Medium details and something meatier still to step up to High or Very High. If your system is fully optimised for DirectX 10 then the general guideline is that you’ll be able to manage having most of the settings on High.

The good news though is that some of the settings have much more of an effect on performance than others, so by checking out our graphics analysis you’ll be able to get decent performance out of your system without shelling out for new hardware. Hopefully.

If you want to check out the exact minimum and suggested requirements of the game then you can check them out here.


It’s worth bearing in mind that the game (at the time of writing) the game doesn’t have any reliably optimised drivers either. We tried the game out on a selection of different systems and met radically different results. The standard gaming rig, packing an 8800 Ultra and 2GB of RAM on Vista Home Premium struggled to get decent FPS and had low twenties even with no combat going on at first, so we switched to a CrossFire system running twin ATI Radeon HD 3870s. CrossFire wasn’t optimised or supported yet driver-side, so there were glitches and the FPS was still scraping twenty even in empty areas on Medium quality.

Disabling CrossFire improved this, removing glitches and getting an extra seven FPS on average, but still only on Medium quality. While the SLI system was getting prepped for a test run, I updated to some new Nvidia beta drivers on the previous system and tried again. This time the game was much more stable and enjoyable – getting 25FPS on High.

The reason I’m telling you all this is two-fold. One, I want you to bear in mind that our performance reports are going to change radically over the next few weeks and a single driver from Nvidia or ATI could make the game suddenly run an awful lot better. Secondly, I don’t want you to read a game from another site which says the game is utterly unplayable and trust that completely. You’d be missing out on a great game.

Now that we’re all up to speed on the importance of drivers and the fluid nature of performance though, let's take a look at the graphical options in detail. Which ones are the most important to striking a balance between performance and fidelity and what which will help you tip that balance to your personal preferences?