Benchmark Results: Crysis
Crysis demonstrates a preference for CrossFire-based configurations until 2560x1600, where the GeForce GTX 480 cards in SLI dominate. The Asus ARES puts up a great fight here though, beating the GeForce GTX 480 cards in SLI at 1920x1080 and matching the performance of two Radeon HD 5870 cards in CrossFire.
[EDIT] We've had some questions regarding the GeForce GTX 480 SLI performance at 1920x1080 in the comments section, and frankly the results look a little strange to us, too. We are aware that Crysis has a strange relationship with SLI so we aren't as surprised as some of our readers, but we went ahead and did some further tests. We re-benchmarked Crysis at 1920x1080 using three GeForce drivers: the 197.75 WHQL, 256.21 WHQL, and the 258.96 betas:
1920x1080 results, Crysis, high Detail, No AA, No AF:
197.75 WHQL: 68 FPS average
256.21 WHQL: 66 FPS average
258.96 BETA: 72 FPS average
In our recent System Builder Marathon Thomas Soderstrom's $2000 PC achieved an average 64 FPS in Crysis when equipped with two GeForce GTX 470 cards in SLI using the 197.75 WHQL drivers. This result is 4 FPS below our GeForce GTX 480 SLI result, and this is about where we'd expect the performance difference between 470's and 480's to be in this particular game. At this point, it seems reasonable to assume our benchmark results are valid and SLI simply has some kind of bottlenecking problem at the 1920x1080 resolution at high detail in Crysis. [/EDIT]
