Crysis

Crytek became famous with their Far Cry first person shooter game, not only for the open-ended gameplay but also because of the stellar system requirements to be able to play the game at high detail. Crysis is their second game and doesn’t disappoint in either gameplay or system requirements.

Crysis offers several methods to test performance with their game, they include two batch files, one geared toward CPU testing, the other toward GPU testing. These two methods provide very repeatable results but unfortunately don’t reflect real gameplay performance, and only give you an indication of how the game will run.



Then there’s the custom timedemo option, after installing the Crysis Editor on your system you can load up any of the maps, then you jump into the map and open the console, “record demoname” and set your own gameplay demo. There are tools like HardwareOC’s which allow you measure min/avg/max FPS while running through your custom demo.

The third option is using FRAPS and recording the FPS this way while you play through a section of the game repeatedly to get an idea how the game performance.

We chose the second method for the repeatability, we tried a few custom demos on one of the island levels, but the most taxing level seemed to be one where you’re inside the Alien spacecraft. This demo was used to test the VGA cards today. The graphics were set to “High” and the benchmark started:



At 1600x1200 both cards offer excellent frame rates, you can definitely enjoy Crysis at these quality settings and resolution.



At 1920x1200 we see a ~5fps drop for both cards, but numbers are still acceptably high. We did notice a lower min. FPS on the HD4870X2, suspecting that this was maybe due to micro-stuttering we manually measured the FPS with FRAPS in-game in the same Alien Spaceship level, but we didn’t notice any stuttering, the 23 fps drop was early on the level.

When we finished these tests we repeated them using Anti-Aliasing (4xAA) but ran into some performance and settings issue which we’ll have to spend more time on before we can share our findings; these issues may be driver related as the 8.8 is still beta.