Game Benchmark: Crysis
To demonstrate a memory usage difference in Crysis, we're going to benchmark first with the High quality setting and next with the Very High quality setting. The Very High settings will use higher-resolution textures, increased shadow resolution, and advanced post-processing that might demonstrate a difference using three levels of texture memory:
First, the High settings:
Only at the high 2560x1600 resolution is the 512MB card experiencing a slight performance penalty. Let's see what happens when we up the ante to the Very High quality settings:
Once again, there is no difference in average frame rates until the 2560x1600 resolution, but the game is running so slow at this point that the results are purely theoretical. However, if we look closer we can see that the minimum frame rate is consistently lower on the 512MB card, so the increased amount of video RAM is providing a benefit.
Crysis remains one of the most performance-adverse PC games on the market. The fact that the 512MB card achieves average frame rates similar to the 2GB card at 1920x1200 suggests that Crysis is somewhat conservative with video RAM use for such an advanced graphics engine.