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 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.

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.










Despite being faster than Nvidia's GeForce GTX 280 when the resolution increases to 1,920 x 1,200 and above, Sapphire's Radeon HD 4850 X2 doesn't increase the playability thresholds beyond 1,920 x 1,200 with 2xAA 8xAF enabled. The Radeon HD 4870 X2, on the other hand, can just about deliver playable frame rates at 2,560 x 1,600 with 0xAA.

When the resolution is below 1,920 x 1,200, the GeForce GTX 280 matches Sapphire's new dual-GPU card frame for frame - frame rates are very smooth on both cards at 1,680 x 1,050 4xAA 8xAF, which is really pleasing for those with 20 to 22-inch widescreen monitors. There's even the scope to increase some of the in-game quality settings to 'very high'.