Big GPU Shootout – Revisited

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:

We could always use a single ‘extra’ frame rate in Crysis for any configuration.  Now at 1680×1050:

Now at 1440×900:

We see the HD 4890’s performance is quite a bit better than the HD 4870 but no single GPU video card is very satisfactory at any resolution tested with maxed settings.  However, Crysis is quite playable with HD 4870-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. Our midrange video cards really struggle with Crysis.