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.

We set all of the in-game 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 4xAA, 1,920 x 1,200 using 0x and 2xAA and 2,560 x 1,600 with 0xAA and 2xAA. By extensively testing using anti-aliasing in very high resolutions in conjunction to Very High quality, we'll be pushing even the bleeding edge hardware on test to the limit.










The GeForce GTX 280 SLI configuration enables very playable frame rates right the way up to 2,560 x 1,600 0xAA 16xAF with high quality in game details – nothing else comes close to it, but then it is the most expensive configuration we've tested here.

The two dual RV770 configurations come close and you can play the game at these settings on them both, but the experience won't be quite the same as you'll get on the GTX 280 SLI setup. They will, however, be pretty similar to the GTX 260+ SLI configuration – all will exhibit some choppiness in the more intensive sections of the title.

Just for kicks, we set the barrier even higher with 2xAA at 2,560 x 1,600, but none of the configurations we tested had enough grunt to deliver playable frame rates. It's pretty sad to see a pair of GeForce GTX 280s almost crying at you under the pressure delivered by the Crysis crunch.