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 – at the time of release they were above and beyond anything we’d ever seen in a PC game.
We tested the game using the 64-bit executable under 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.
Crysis appears to benefit more from higher CPU speed than it does from additional cores, so it isn’t surprising to see the Phenom X3 8750 match the Phenom X4 9750 with both high and medium image quality settings. And what’s more, the lack of raw CPU frequency hinders the Phenom X3’s performance against similarly priced Intel dual-core processors and it still falls behind when it’s overclocked to 3.0GHz.