Crysis - DX10, High

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, 1,920 x 1,200 using 0x and 2xAA and 2,560 x 1,600 with 0xAA and 2xAA. By extensively testing using anti-aliasing in very high resolutions in conjunction to Very High quality, we'll be pushing even the bleeding edge hardware on test to the limit.










We weren't expecting to see any kind of tangible benefit from the 2GB of GDDR5 the Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 Vapor-X 2GB is equipped with but it pulled slightly ahead of the Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 1GB Atomic which boasts a much higher core speed. We re-ran the tests again but got the same results, so our only conclusion is that Crysis is more efficient with higher density memory, offsetting the core clock difference, or there's simply a bottleneck elsewhere. If Crysis used in excess of 1GB of video memory - as we scaled the resolution and AA settings the 1GB card frame rate would drop off.

At higher resolutions, the extra speed of the Atomic saw it pull along side the Vapor-X where the two were matched at 2,560 x 1,600 2xAA and 1,920 x 1,200 2xAA. It's an interesting result, especially as the 1GHz Atomic is much more expensive too (providing you can actually find one for sale now!).