Crysis

Publisher: Electronic Arts

What can we say about this game that hasn't been said already? Crysis was probably the most anticipated game on the PC last year and was released on November 16th 2007.

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 before in a PC game.

We tested the game under both DirectX 9.0 and DirectX 10 with the 1.1 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. We found that around 30 fps in our 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.

For our testing under both DirectX 9.0 and DirectX 10, we set the majority of the in-game settings to medium, with shaders and sound set to high. Because of how intense the game is, we tested with both anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering disabled on these mid-range cards – but of course, you can enable AA if you want to sacrifice some other in-game details in order to get a playable frame rate. There is currently no support for anisotropic filtering in the game, but you can still force it from the driver control panel.

DirectX 9.0

DirectX 10

PowerColor's Radeon HD 3850 Xtreme PCS 512MB card starts off particularly well in Crysis, with higher performance than Nvidia's GeForce 8800 GS 384MB across the board. Using both DirectX 9.0 and DirectX 10 render paths, the performance difference is relatively unnoticeable at 1280x1024, but it might be the difference between playable and unplayable at 1680x1050.

Compared to the other Radeons, PowerColor's card performs pretty well against the Radeon HD 3870, while the Radeon HD 3850 256MB suffers a little from the smaller memory size – this appears to be the case in this title, even with textures set to medium quality.