Crysis Investigation

Test 1: Preset Settings (XP)

The default settings in Crysis allow low, medium, high and very high (Vista only) presets to be applied to all of the game’s settings. Setting all of the options to one of these presets is the most basic change you can make to Crysis, so we’ll start there.

Firstly let’s take a look at the difference in image quality on Windows XP:

XP All High

XP All Medium

XP All Low

Ignore the missing back wheels as the problem is caused by loading an old saved game with a newer version of Crysis.

As for image quality, moving all settings from high to medium causes the following most obvious changes:

• The scene gets darker, courtesy of HDR being removed.
• The waves hitting the beach no longer have foam.
• There is a reduction in the overall quality of caustics, ripples and lighting on the water surface.
• High up on the hill to the left there is a reduction in the number of trees.
• There is a reduction of overall foliage thickness on the trees along the shore running to the left.
• Some of the rocks get simpler in shape.

Now we move all settings from medium to low and observe the following differences:

• A simpler and more generic lighting system is being applied to the whole scene.
• There is a dramatic loss of detail and simplification across most textures in the game, especially the mountain, hillside surfaces and sand surfaces.
• Water caustics are gone and the level of transparency of the water is dramatically reduced.
• There is a large reduction of vegetation on the hill to the right and also along the coastline running to the left.
• Many rocks are missing from the coastline running to the left.
• The shadows under the boat and jeep to the right are gone.

Here are the benchmark results from the GPU benchmark.

We can clearly see dropping to medium provides a substantial performance gain while dropping to low provides a massive performance gain but obviously at a huge reduction in image quality.