Results: Crysis 3 At 1920x1080 And 2560x1440
As with BioShock, I wanted to maintain the same test setting in Crysis 3 across our three resolutions for comparison purposes. Interestingly enough, the numbers we see from Radeon R9 280X match up with what we saw in AMD Radeon R9 280X, R9 270X, And R7 260X: Old GPUs, New Names, even using a newer driver. However, more powerful graphics hardware appears to push us into a platform bottleneck at 1920x1080 and 2560x1440. The easiest way around this would be using a more taxing detail preset (though as you’ll see in the Ultra HD tests, High is really the ceiling for single-GPU gaming at 3840x2160).
At 1920x1080, all of the cards fall into a narrow range. Pushing to 2560x1440 spread it out a bit. But it won’t be until we reach 3840x2160 that we see the bars better-differentiated.
What about all of those spikes and dips? Crysis 3 is the one game in our suite that requires manual input to run through a preset path. Enemies take different paths and terrain gets affected by explosions. We typically run this test multiple times when it looks like something might affect the outcome noticeably, but the more severe discrepancies at 1920x1080 seem to confirm that the platform is playing more of a role in the frame rates than our powerful graphics cards.
Less consistent frame delivery affects the dual-card solutions most. AMD’s Radeon HD 7990 sees the highest average variance, though Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 690 gets hit by more severe worst-case results.
