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.

We used this Crysis benchmark tool which enables you to define a custom time demo; using the build-in “Assault” run-through we measured performance of both cards. We briefly tested the 64-bit executable included with Crysis when installed on a 64-bit OS, but performance was actually lower with no IQ benefit, so we stuck to the 32-bit .exe for all our tests.



First up, HQ setting with/without AA enabled, seeing as even a HD4870X2 can struggle in this game, our hopes weren’t very high :



We stuck to 1600x1200 with the HQ setting, without AA both cards are able to average 30fps, but that doesn’t mean smooth gameplay at all. With AA enabled it’s worse still, as you can expect, the 8800 GTX is slightly faster here, most likely thanks to it’s superior memory bandwidth and size.

Let’s dial things down a bit, everything set to Medium Quality:



Very playable now, even at 1920x1200; the GTX+ has an impressive ~22% lead. Let’s include 4xAA:



Neither card quite up for that, again the gab closes between the GTX+ and the 8800 as the resolution/AA increases.

Last test is with a mix of Medium and High Quality settings to delivery close to HQ visuals.



The Sparkle 9800GTX+ definitely the better card if you start tweaking Crysis’ image settings, close to 20% faster than the 8800 GTX at playable frame rates.