Crysis Investigation

Test 1: Preset Settings (Vista)

Now let’s take a look at the difference in image quality on Windows Vista:

Vista All Very High

Vista All High

Vista All Medium

Vista All Low

First, we find an apparently strange Radeon driver bug with this configuration: high has less textures and details than medium across much of this scene.

As for image quality, moving all settings from very high to high causes the following most obvious changes, and in some cases it is worse than medium settings:

• The textures get badly blurred on the mountain.
• The clarity of the water changes.
• 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 that can be differentiated from each other.
• There is less contrast between the foliage and the rocks.
• Some of the rocks get simpler in shape and less textured.

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

• There is a slight loss of detail and simplification across some textures in the scene; however, medium is actually better in the trees and in many textures on the mountain.  This is likely a driver bug as it is noted on both 4870 and 4870×2.
• The rocks actually seem to have more HDR and lighting detail than high.

Finally, we move all settings from medium to low and observe the most extreme 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 almost all textures in the game.
• 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 and also along the coastline running to the left.
• Many rocks are missing from the coastline to the left in front of the buildings and details are mostly gone.

Here are the benchmark results from the GPU benchmark:

We can clearly see dropping to high from very high provides a substantial performance gain but is ugly, possibly due to continuing driver bugs (in some cases textures are worse than medium). Of course dropping to low provides a massive performance gain but obviously at a huge reduction in image quality and textures.