Crysis
Crysis is still attracting a surprising and ongoing amount of attention, with the rumors around the end of the embargo period on the new Nvidia cards adding to its noted power-hungriness. Here’s what we found (note that we tested the game with a new scene that’s less power-intensive than the preceding one).
Due to the game’s power demands (we chose to test it at the same resolutions as the other cards this time), the hierarchy you see in the graphs reflects the results without filters, since they’re more pertinent. Is Crysis playable at 1920*1200 on the GTX 280? Yes, but less playable than with the 9800 GX2 with our test scene! Only once antialiasing was enabled did the 280 hold its own, but the frame rate became a little too low to play in Very High detail mode. So the only problem is that while in three of the four resolutions the GTX 280 was clearly ahead of the 9800 GX2 with Crysis, they happen to be the resolutions where the game is unfortunately not always playable. And that’s despite the more-than-doubled performance at 2560*1600 and the fact that the new cards are the only ones – except for the 8800 Ultra – that can really render the game with antialiasing added. So that was a bit of a disappointment.
