Crysis Gaming Tests

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.

Crysis is a heavily CPU-bound game, but only if the video card can keep up. The benchmark settings were specifically chosen to illustrate this. At 1024x768, we see a clear difference in framerates, with the Core i7-870 securing a commanding lead over the rest of the processors. However, as we tax the video card more with increased resolutions and settings, our HD 4850 becomes the limiting factor. That said, you'll want to pair these processors with a high end video card to get the most out of them in gaming.

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