Vista 32 vs. Vista 64 shootout – PC Gaming

CRYSIS

Now we move on to Crysis, a science fiction first person shooter by Crytek. Crysis is based in a fictional near-future where an ancient 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’ in the game where he is armed with various 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 the 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 panels. Here is Crysis’ Island Demo benchmarks, at 1920×1200 resolution, and then at 1680×1050.

We sense a real disappointment here, perhaps. We see Crysis apparently only optimizes for the 32-bit pathway and we see GTX280 take a nose dive in framerates as we move from Vista 32 to Vista 64. We can only assume that there are driver issues.  Let’s look at 1650×1080:

Again, not much except that GTX280 is again slower on the 64-bit pathway. However, the difference is usually by a single frame rate or two. Crysis does not appear to take advantage of 64-bit. However, through much of the game we note that it is quite playable with 4870-X2, even with 4xAA/16xAF, if you are willing to tweak your settings a bit downward.