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 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 30-33 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.

For our testing, we set all quality 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 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, we'll be pushing even the bleeding edge hardware on test to the limit.










Oh dear, the 9800 GTX+ gets off to a rocky start with DirectX 10 performance in Crysis which is frankly all over the place. We were so surprised by these results, we ran and re-ran them half a dozen times, getting similar results every time. We can only conclude that we're seeing a driver bug here, as there's simply no way that our SLI 9800 GTX+ setup should perform worse than a single 9800 GTX+ in everything bar 1,280 x 1,024. Such are the perils when using SLI or CrossFire multiple GPU setups – you're completely dependant on well written drivers for your performance, and if, as we suspect here, you encounter a bug, then you're frequently better off with just a single card!

During our attempts to debug the GeForce 9800 GTX+'s SLI results, which involved trying both older and newer drivers than the one used here, we found that scaling 'fixed' itself when anisotropic filtering was disabled. Performance returned to where we think it should be, as it was then tussling with the Radeon HD 4850 CrossFire configuration.

Speaking of which, the 4850s in CrossFire fared much better, posting very impressive performance figures which are either just ahead or just behind Nvidia's GTX 280 single GPU card – a solution which costs a great deal more than two 4850s! However, the 4850s didn't get off scott free either – they were also victims of driver problems as well, with frequent driver crashes meaning we had to repeat our testing many times before the cards were able to complete a full test run.