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 (DirectX 10) framework, but can also run using DirectX 9, on Vista, Windows XP and the new Windows 7. As we'll see, there are significant frame rate reductions when running Crysis in DX10. It's not an operating system issue, DX9 works fine in WIN7, but DX10 knocks the frame rates in half.

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.

Once again, we are going to concentrate on relatively low-resolution testing performance. At the 1280x1024 resolution used by 17"; and 19"; monitors, the CPU and memory may have some influence on the results, but our test rig in this case is well above the specs that a typical HD5450 user will have, so we've eliminated that variable. At 1280x1024, and the widescreen resolutions of 1680x1050, the performance differences between the video cards under test are mostly down to the cards.

The results here are pretty consistent with 3DMark Vantage, in that the HD5450 is stuck in a range close to, but below the teens. For most users, the performance of the HD5450 in this challenging scenario is going to be frustrating, ultimately unacceptable, and bordering on painful. Comparing the HD5450 directly against its higher priced siblings shows that performance goes up almost exponentially. The HD5670 costs twice as much, but has almost ten times the performance in this real-world application. Anyone looking to play a little Crysis on their 1080P HTPC needs to look at either the HD5670 or perhaps the soon-to-be-released HD5570 as a minimum starting point.

Once a decent amount of anti-aliasing is factored in, the situation degrades even further. Frame rates are way below acceptable until you get close to the $100 mark with the HD5670. If you want to play this game in DX10 with eye candy turned on, you are going to have to pay, both with cash as well as increased heat and power consumption.

In our next section, Benchmark Reviews tests with Devil May Cry 4 Benchmark. Read on to see how a blended high-demand GPU test with low video frame buffer demand will impact our test products.

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