Crysis

Crytek became famous with their Far Cry first person shooter game, not only for the open-ended gameplay but also because of the stellar system requirements to be able to play the game at high detail. Crysis is their second game and doesn’t disappoint in either gameplay or system requirements.

Crysis offers several methods to test performance with their game, they include two batch files, one geared toward CPU testing, the other toward GPU testing. These two methods provide very repeatable results but unfortunately don’t reflect real gameplay performance, and only give you an indication of how the game will run.

We used this Crysis benchmark tool which enables you to define a custom time demo; using the build-in “Assault” run-through we measured performance of both cards. We briefly tested the 64-bit executable included with Crysis when installed on a 64-bit OS, but performance was actually lower with no IQ benefit, so we stuck to the 32-bit .exe for all our tests.

First with High Quality preset:



As the first reviews of the HD 4870 X2 hit the web we read through most of them and found the performance numbers of Crysis to differ quite a bit between reviews. We did a small report on this here. Now we have tested it for ourselves, and as you can see from the results the choice of OS and Render path is crucial to the outcome of the benchmark.

With the Geforce GTX 280 going from XP to Vista doesn’t drop performance on bit, but enabling the DX10 render path is fatal as you can see, especially with AA enabled the FPS drops below playable levels.

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 fares better, going from XP to Vista with DX9 actually boosts performance by ~30%! Switching to the DX10 render path has minimal impact without AA, and no impact with AA enabled.

Next up, Very High Quality and 2gb vs 4gb testing:



Neither of these cards is fast enough to run Crysis with Very High preset at 1920x1200, below 30fps numbers everywhere, the HD 4870 X2 is almost twice as fast when AA is enabled, but still too slow. Adding more system memory (2gb -> 4gb) does nothing for the GTX 280, but with the Radeon we did see small fps increase.

For a detail view of the results, with AA scaling and XP -> Vista Scaling see this table

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You must also have noticed the stellar performance when it comes down the AA scaling with Crysis; according to the results could enable 4xAA or 8xAA and not notice a drop in performance… to see whether the benchmark was telling us the truth we loaded our own manual FRAPS run-through of the same Assault map; do note that a slightly different path was taken. These tests were done with the HD 4870 X2 and system 2gb ram:



At the high quality settings the findings are pretty much on par, the difference between 4xAA and 8xAA is indeed negligible. But unlike the results with Very High quality would like you to believe, there is a larger performance drop going from 4xAA to 8xAA here. We’ve read some claims of people playing Crysis at 1920x1200 Very High detail with 16xAA enabled at 30fps + with the Radeon card… but after several weeks of testing we just can’t seem to duplicate this, as soon as AA is enabled performance drops below 30fps when Very High preset is used.