Crysis Video Cards
It's clear that Crytek had next-generation video cards in mind when it developed Crysis. Unless you pair up two of the very best video cards money can buy, nothing from this generation of video cards comes close to providing playable frame rates when running the game at a high resolution with maximum settings. Of the four overall quality settings, the top very-high-quality setting will challenge even the most powerful video cards of this generation. Fortunately, high quality still looks superb, and you don't need a King Kong of a video card to run Crysis at high quality, although you might have to compromise on resolution.
Our GeForce 8800 GTX barely managed to run the Crysis GPU benchmark with a playable level of performance at 1600x1200 with high quality settings. If you have a high-resolution LCD monitor, prepare to play at lower, nonnative resolutions or reduce the graphics quality settings down to medium or low. You'll likely need a dual-card setup to get the game running well at high resolution with good image quality. The only problem with dual-card systems is that many games either don't support multiple video cards or have mediocre support on release day. Our GeForce 8800 GTX SLI setup managed to put up impressive numbers, but our ATI CrossFire setups crashed the game. We expect multicard support to improve in the coming weeks.
We ran the SLI setup using the latest Nvidia drivers, version 169.09. For the rest of the Nvidia GPUs, we used the 169.04 drivers and changed the name of the Crysis executable to counteract the graphical downgrade that increased performance. Due to time constraints, we were not able to retest all of our single-card results using the new driver. Nvidia representatives assured us that single-card performance did not change significantly between the two driver versions.
We also tested Crysis on Windows XP, Windows Vista 32-bit, and Windows Vista 64-bit to see how performance varied across different operating systems. (Yes, Windows XP still wins.)
[Update, 11/15/07]: AMD has just released its ATI Radeon HD 3800 Series cards. You can find ATI Radeon HD 3870 and HD 3950 Crysis performance results in our new ATI Radeon HD 3800 Series Hands-On.
Video Card Tests
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
Operating Systems
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
System Setup: Intel Core 2 X6800, Intel 975XBX2, eVGA 680i SLI, 2GB Corsair XMS Memory (1GBx2), 160GB Seagate 7200.7 SATA Hard Disk Drive, Windows XP Professional SP2. Graphics Cards: GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB, GeForce 8800 GT 512MB, GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB, XFX GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB XXX Edition, GeForce 8600 GTS 256MB, GeForce 8600 GT 256MB, GeForce 7900 GS 256MB, GeForce 7600 GT 256MB, GeForce 6800 128MB, GeForce 6600GT 128MB, Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB, Radeon HD 2600 XT 256MB, Radeon HD 2600 Pro 256MB, Radeon HD 2400 XT 256MB, Radeon X1950 XTX 512MB, Radeon X1900 XT 256MB, Radeon X1950 Pro 256MB, Radeon X1650 XT 256MB, Radeon X1300 XT 256MB. Graphics Drivers: beta Nvidia ForceWare 169.04, beta Nvidia Forceware 169.09, ATI Catalyst 7.10
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