CrossFire-X, eXplored

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 various 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:

We could always use a single ‘extra’ frame rate in Crysis that overclocking HD4890 provides.  Now at 1680×1050:

We see the HD4890-XOC’s performance is quite a bit better than the HD4870 and our further overclock makes a little practical improvement. Crysis is quite playable with HD4870-X2, even with 4xAA/16xAF, if you are willing to tweak your settings a bit downward. Tri-Fire is faster overall in the averages and the maximums but still hangs in the mid 20s swapping performance with 4890 CrossFire. Perhaps most interesting is that the drivers allow the HD4890 CrossFire to be beaten by all flavors of the HD4890+HD4870 “Frankenfire”, with the overclock on the linked HD4870 making further improvement as the overclocked speeds go up.