The battle of the HTPC cards, Galaxy’s GT 520 vs. HD 6450 (GDDR5 vs. GDDR3)

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 the following year. CryEngine2 is the game engine used to power Crysis and Warhead and it is an extended version of the CryEngine that also powers Far Cry. 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.

It is noted that actually playing this game is a bit slower than the demo implies. All of our settings are set to the in-game maximum’s “very high” including 2xAA for 1680×1050 and we force 16xAF in the control panels. Here is Crysis’ Island Demo benchmark, only at 1680×1050 and with 2xAA.

All of our target cards are simply too slow and the GT 520 is faster than the new HIS 6450 and GT 220. The overclocked Galaxy GT 520 even passes the GDDR5 HD 6450 although it is still a slideshow. We will make sure to test further in Warhead, a better optimized game.