High Performance Gaming on a Budget: Athlon II vs. Phenom II vs. Q9550S

CRYSIS

Next we move on to Crysis, a science fiction first person shooter by Crytek. It remains one of the most demanding games for any PC and it is also still one of the most beautiful games released to date. Crysis is based in a fictional near-future where an alien spacecraft is discovered buried on an island near the coast of Korea. The single-player campaign has you assume the role of USA Delta Force, ‘Nomad’ who is armed with futuristic weapons and equipment. Crysis uses DirectX10 for graphics rendering.

A standalone but related game, Crysis Warhead was released last year. CryEngine2 is the game engine used to power Crysis and Warhead and it is an extended version of the CryEngine that powers FarCry. As well as supporting Shader Model 2.0, 3.0, and DirectX10’s 4.0, CryEngine2 is also multi-threaded to take advantage of SMP-aware systems and Crytek has developed their own proprietary physics system, called CryPhysics. However, it is noted that actually playing this game is a bit slower than the demo implies.

GPU Demo, Island

All of our settings are set to ‘maximum’ including 4xAA and we force 16AF in the control panel. Here is Crysis’ Island Demo benchmark, first at 1920×1200 resolution with the HD 4870-X2 and our 4 CPUs; but we will save our comments until after all four charts are displayed:

Now at 1920×1200 with the GTX 280:

Now at 1680×1050 with our HD 4870-X2:

Finally our GTX 280 at 1680×1050:

Crysis is quite playable with HD 4870-X2 and with all of our overclocked CPUs, even with 4xAA/16xAF, if you are willing to tweak some of your settings a bit downward.  Here we generally see our overclocked CPUs sitting within a couple of frames per second, except at 1680×1050 with the HD 4870-X2 where the Q9550S pulls ahead in the minimum.  Pure core speed is most important with our slower overclocked tri-core losing to both the faster-clocked Phenom II dual-core and occasionally to the overclocked Athlon II dual-core.  In this case of comparing dual cores, clock for clock, we would chose the Phenom II over the Athlon II with them at their stock clocks; overclocked the performance is very close when paired with our HD 4870-X2. 

With GTX 280, there is very little difference in the framerates no matter where we look at either resolution.  Just one or two frames per second separate the fastest CPU from the slowest.