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.

In addition to testing under both DirectX 9.0 and DirectX 10 with all quality details set to High, we feel it's about time hardware should be able to handle the game with the in-game settings tuned to Very High. The game has been out for at least a year now, so it's time for hardware manufacturers to catch up with the software.

We forced 8x anisotropic filtering in the driver menu as there is currently no support for it in game and 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 in conjunction with Very High quality in-game settings, we'll be pushing even the bleeding edge hardware on test to the limit.








The minor overclock BFG has given the water-cooled GTX 285 H20 gives it a tiny amount of extra performance when compared to a stock-speed GTX 285. We saw anywhere between 0.5-.09fps improvement in average frame rate, while the minimums are identical. This still means that the card will just about handle Crysis at it’s very best at 1,680 x 1,050 with no AA, which is fairly good going.

However, Newegg has a Powercolor HD 4870 X2 2GB for $409.99 (or $389.99 after a $20 rebate) and this card offers a very welcome 3-4fps more than the BFG. Considering that the HD 4870 X2 is a good bit cheaper, it's stiff competition.