Crysis Benchmark Results

Crysis uses a new graphics engine: the CryENGINE2, which is the successor to Far Cry's CryENGINE. CryENGINE2 is among the first engines to use the Direct3D 10 (DirectX10) framework of Windows Vista, but can also run using DirectX9, both on Vista and Windows XP.

Roy Taylor, Vice President of Content Relations at NVIDIA, has spoken on the subject of the engine's complexity, stating that Crysis has over a million lines of code, 1GB of texture data, and 85,000 shaders. To get the most out of modern multicore processor architectures, CPU intensive subsystems of CryENGINE 2 such as physics, networking and sound, have been re-written to support multi-threading.

Crysis offers an in-game benchmark tool, which is similar to World in Conflict. This short test does place some high amounts of stress on a graphics card, since there are so many landscape features rendered. For benchmarking purposes, Crysis can mean trouble as it places a high demand on both GPU and CPU resources. Benchmark Reviews uses the Crysis Benchmark Tool by Mad Boris to test frame rates in batches, which allows the results of many tests to be averaged.

Low-resolution testing allows the graphics processor to plateau maximum output performance, which thereby shifts demand onto the system components. At the lower resolutions Crysis will reflect the GPU's top-end speed in the composite score, indicating full-throttle performance with little load. This makes for a less GPU-dependant test environment, and is helpful in creating a baseline for measuring maximum output performance in the next few test results. At the 1280x1024 resolution used by 19" monitors, our results show that performance is beginning to really drop despite the small difference is pixels drawn. In terms of general performance, all of these products maintain the same performance ratio as before, except for the 9800 GX2 which seems to beneficially hold its ground.

Crysis doesn't seem to favor the large video frame buffer Palit offers to both the GeForce 9600 GT Sonic Edition and 9800 GT Super+ Edition, because both cards appear exactly at the same position in these benchmarks as all the past tests. At lower resultions, there's a larger desparity between products, but at 1920x1200 the playing field is leveled and the FPS range moves down to 14-23. At 15.7 FPS (1920x1280) the Palit GeForce 9800 GT comes very close to the 16.0 FPS rendered by the overclocked 9800 GTX, but still a short distance away from the 18.4 FPS produced by Sapphires Radeon HD 4850.

In our final test, Call of Duty 4 provides the Palit GeForce 9800 GT Super+ 1GB video card NE/9800TXT302 with just enough pressure to make a difference in our charts.

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