Benchmark Results: Crysis
Crysis remains one of the most beautiful PC games ever made and experiencing it in 3D stereo promises the chance to get away to a virtual tropical island paradise (before it freezes over, that is). Of all the games to play in 3D, Crysis provides the richest experience. All of the foliage and details really pop out of the screen.
Game Settings:
We set the native projector resolution to 1920x1080 and the game's visual-detail settings to medium quality in DirectX 9 mode.
We chose to go past the projector's native resolution in Crysis because AA doesn't have an effect on the foliage. Downscaling the 1080p signal to a 720p projector delivers better quality than activating AA in the 720p native resolution in this title. We chose DirectX 9 mode, but those of you who have played Crysis in DirectX 9 and 10 will know that there is very little difference, so we won’t lose any noticeable visual fidelity.
Game Experience Using the TriDef Ignition Driver:
In regular mode, the TriDef driver seems to turn off shadows by default and suffers from some distracting sky texture issues where the left and right eye view does not match. This makes for some irritating exercises in trying to find a way to defeat this limitation. It turns out that the Virtual 3D option is key. Enabling this not only fixes all of the shadow and sky issues, but it provides a much-needed performance boost.
Unfortunately, other troubles emerge. The TriDef driver seems to interfere with the Crysis menu system somehow, providing long, unresponsive pauses and slowdowns when loading a game. In addition, the Virtual 3D mode causes many of the game's regular controls to inexplicably open the options menu. The TriDef driver renders the game unplayable, not because of any visual problems, but due to control glitches.
Game Experience Using the iZ3D Driver:
The iZ3D driver works well in Crysis and provides none of the control and menu issues we experienced with the TriDef driver. However, some shadows and reflections are strangely rendered differently for each eye, so it is necessary to play with the driver's convergence setting in order to get acceptable visuals. Things are not perfect, but we can tweak them to an acceptable state.
However, aside from the image-quality issues, there are no slowdowns or glitches and everything works as it should.
Unfortunately, the iZ3D driver doesn't correctly capture screenshots of Crysis, instead delivering blacked-out image files. We will try to remedy this omission in a follow-up review.
Crysis 3D Stereo Performance:
Once again, we are seeing a scenario in which the TriDef driver isn't playing nicely with the GeForce GTX 260 card until Virtual 3D is enabled. Otherwise, performance is fairly constant between the graphics cards (except for a Radeon performance boost when using the iZ3D driver). While we prefer the look of the TriDef output, control issues force us to play the game using the iZ3D driver, and in this case performance was a low 20-26 FPS. Perhaps we could lower the resolution to 1280x720 to actually use the game, but in our testing the low frame rate seems surprisingly playable.
