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 DirectX 10 mode 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.

We set all of the in-game 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 4xAA, and 1,920 x 1,200 using 0x and 4xAA. By extensively testing using anti-aliasing in very high resolutions in conjunction to High quality, we'll be pushing these mid range cards to the limit.








In Crysis there's very little difference between the performance of a GTS 250 512MB and Gigabyte's GTS 250 1GB, with most results within 0.3fps of each other. However, at higher AA settings at higher resolutions, such as 1,680 x 1,050 with 4xAA the extra memory does provide a boost, increasing minimum frame rates by 3fps and average frame rates by ten percent, although the resultant frame rate isn't what you'd call playable.

In comparison the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, which costs just £10 more than the Gigabyte card, is noticeably faster by a factor of more than fifteen percent in a number of tests.