Core i7 vs. Penryn vs. Phenom II with HD 4870-X2 & TriFire

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 also 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 dual core 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 “very high” including 4xAA and we force 16xAF in the control panel. Here is Crysis’ Island Demo benchmark, first at 1920×1200 resolution with the HD 4870-X2, Tri-fire, and our five CPUs; but we will save our comments until after our charts are displayed:

And now at 1680×1050:

For the first time we see Tri-Fire making a noticeable difference over just using a single HD 4870-X2. We see the Core i7 begin to pull away from all of the other CPUs and especially it differentiates itself at 16×10. Conversely, we see Core i7 fall flat with the HD 4870-X2 against the other CPUs. We suspect hyper-threading for some of the variability we see with Core i7.

Generally, however, CPU clockspeed is king and the faster the CPU with any given graphics, the faster Crysis runs and much more noticeably so with faster graphics. Here we see minimums and averages vary considerably – sometimes making the difference between playable and unplayable, depending on CPU clockspeeds. In this case, overclocking your CPU makes sense if you want playable framerates without making too many visual sacrifices by lowering settings.

Crysis is quite playable with our HD 4870-X2 and an even better experience with Tri-Fire with all of our overclocked CPUs; even with 4xAA/16xAF, if you are willing to tweak some of your graphics settings a bit downward. We see a big difference from our last article where a single GPU, our GTX 280, did not make much difference at any CPU speed or at either resolution. So it appears that faster multi-GPU graphics do require a faster CPU with Crysis.