Crysis Gaming

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.

When testing a CPU, the settings we choose are a bit different than a typical video card review. As you'll see in the charts below, modern games can easily max out the processing abilities of the video card and mask any differences between the CPUs. For this reason, we generally start at low resolutions and quality settings and slowly ramp them up until we hit the limit of the video card. This allows us to quickly distinguish differences between CPUs and identify any other limiting hardware.

As expected, the Athlon II X2 250 lands between the Athlon X2 7850 and Phenom II X2 550 in our collection of Crysis benchmarks. The Intel E7400 takes the lead out of the dual cores, but as we approach the limit of our HD 4870 in the third test, the results begin to level out. The good new is that the X2 250 appears to be enough to drive a high-end video card. However, the same cannot be said for our X2 4850e.

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