Crysis (2007) : PC Performance Benchmarks for Graphics Cards and Processors

BASIC INFORMATION ON THE GAME

 

Year of release : November 13, 2007
Genre : Action (Shooter) / 3D / 1st Person
Developer : Crytek
Publisher : Electronic Arts
Publisher in Russia : Soft Club

 

People have often imagined the end of the world, attributing the fatal role of the executioner to either a flood, a terrible disease, or a nuclear war. In fact, everything turned out a little more exotic. An asteroid that crashed onto one of the remote islands turned out to be a huge spaceship capable of completely changing the Earth's climate. The detachments of North Korea and the United States, which went to study the anomaly, turned out to be the only defenders of humanity. Get ready to face an unknown enemy face to face - in this battle you have a decisive role to play!

The new exciting fantasy action movie Crysis is a brilliant creation of Crytek Studios, the famous FarCry project! Players have to become fighters of an elite American unit and go to the island where an alien starship was discovered. The world around us is constantly changing, vast territories are instantly covered with ice, hurricanes and tornadoes are raging around. But most importantly, there are those on the island who are going to exterminate humanity! 

THE GRAFICAL PART

In this subsection of our review, the main graphical aspects of this game are revealed. Particular attention is paid to the version of the graphics engine used, the version of the API used, graphics settings and the quality of the development of the main visual aspects.

Supported OS and graphics API

Crysis is supported by major Windows operating systems, which include Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8. Other operating systems are not currently supported by the developers and will not be supported. 

 

The priority and primary graphics API for Crysis is  DirectX 10 . 

Game engine

CryTek, having sold all the rights to FarCry, decided to develop a new version of the engine, as well as create a new cult series called Crysis along the way. CryEngine 2 is written in the same way as its predecessor in C++, but perhaps its main difference is that it is not cross-platform. The only OS platform it supports is Windows. In fairness, it can be noted that they tried to port it to the 7th generation consoles - PS3, XboX 360 and Wii. There was even a closed testing of the capabilities of this engine, but unfortunately, the consoles of this engine were never seen. CryEngine 2 at the time of its release is the most technologically advanced and photorealistic engine compared to its competitors. 

The engine was written using the DirectX 9 and 10 application programming interface. CryEngine 2 incorporates and improves on all of the technologies of its predecessor, CryEngine, as well as many new and innovative graphics technologies. Level development still remained at its best, even improved, CryEngine 2 is still good at huge open and closed locations, but there was also a resource pumping system that allowed filling levels as the player progressed.

The render engine is also no exception. depending on the version of DirectX, as well as on the choice of 32 or 64 bit system, the engine should provide a different render. Sometimes developers don't use 64-bit capabilities or a more modern API. Powerful tooling features allow the developer to analyze engine performance in real time, generate detailed memory usage reports, and perform automated walkthroughs at every level to get consistent and complete test results. 

Crytek benefited from 64-bit architecture, because the size of the game level has not decreased since the days of FarCry, therefore, the cost of resources for drawing it has increased significantly. This led 32-bit systems to limit the RAM and support for 64-bit systems easily solved this problem. All engine components are Crytek's own developments. CryEngine 2 supports and actively uses multi-threading in multi-core processors and processors using multi-threading technology. Other interesting features include light projection technology that supports not only HDR and dynamic shadows, but also the calculation of light as a post-rendering effect, such a lighting technology is called SSAO.

The physics engine was developed by CryTek themselves and is called CryPhysics, a multi-threaded real-time physics engine integrated into CryEngine 2. The huge functionality of the created technology made it possible to perform various manipulations with physics and can be applied to almost all objects on the level, including trees and vegetation, can realistically simulate the reaction of these objects to such influences as gravity, wind, explosions, friction and collision with other objects. Probably CryTek needed its own physics to achieve the optimal result from its development.

 

Flexible vegetation that responds to the effects of wind, rain or character movement, realistically modeled interactive rope bridges, physically controlled animation of creature tentacles - all this is just part of the possibilities of advanced rope physics.

 

Dynamic physics allows you to interact with any arbitrary surrounding object or shape, selectively destroy buildings, trees or other objects, and then interact with the resulting debris and remnants. The engine uses predefined characteristics of breaking or breaking objects.

 

The new CryEngine 2 character animation system has significantly improved, compared to the CryEngine animation system, the animation of people, models and vehicles in real time. A fully integrated character editor provides animation previews inside the Sandbox 2 editor. The character customization system and parametric skeletal animation have created more unique and lively NPCs.

 

Using adaptive keyframe compression technology, CryEngine 2 can adjust the level of compression to match the precision required for any given animation. Thanks to the compression, which slightly distorts the accuracy of the movement, it became possible to free up at least 90% of the RAM. 

 

Advanced game settings

 

Crysis has a wide range of graphics settings. you can also change the settings for four main sub-items - low average, high and maximum.

       

Below we have provided screenshots of the game at various graphics settings, where our readers can see the difference between the minimum, medium and maximum graphics quality settings. 

Various quality modes

The difference between graphics settings is amazing, the changes are huge...

Comparison of FullHD and 4K

In 4K, Crysis looks like a real nextgen.

 

Comparison of anti-aliasing modes

 

Activating full-screen anti-aliasing does not completely eliminate surface roughness and its use does not produce the desired changes.

General visual design and game physics

Crysis is the game that hardly anyone has heard of. This project is a pretty good first-person shooter with a very significant difference, namely the graphic component, which was years ahead of its time and even wipes its nose with modern AA class games.

 

Of course, now the game looks great, but 7 years ago its release could be compared with a real graphic explosion that brought any top gaming hardware to its knees. But at the same time, it should be noted that for the minimum settings, a very democratic system was required, at the level of the requirements of the original Far Cry for medium settings. 

 

Next, we will go directly to the gaming tests and determine what impact this game has on modern computer hardware. 

TEST PART

GPU test

All video cards were tested at maximum graphics quality by MSI Afterburner. The purpose of the test is to determine how video cards from different manufacturers behave under the same conditions. The average and minimum FPS were taken as the performance indicator. Below is a video of a test segment of the gaming benchmark:   

Our video cards were tested at resolutions of 1920x1080, 2560x1600 and 3840x2160 at the maximum graphics quality settings allowed by Crysis. SLI and AMD CrossFireX have sufficient game support, showing excellent scalability. 

 

Testing at 1920x1080 resolution

 

      

Testing at maximum quality settings 1920x1080 

  

With these settings,  video cards of the Radeon HD 6850 or GeForce GTX 560 level showed an acceptable FPS.   Radeon HD 6870 or GeForce GTX 560 solutions will be optimal.

Testing at 2560x1600 resolution

       

Testing at maximum quality settings 2560x1600

 

With these settings,  video cards of the Radeon HD 6970 or GeForce GTX 750 Ti level showed an acceptable FPS.  Radeon HD 7950 or GeForce GTX 760 solutions will be optimal  .

Testing at 3840x2160 resolution

      

Testing at maximum quality settings 3840x2560

 

With these settings,  video cards of the Radeon R9 290X or GeForce GTX 780 level showed an acceptable FPS.  Radeon R9 290X or GeForce GTX 780 SLI solutions will be optimal.

Testing of the video memory consumed by the game was carried out by the  MSI Afterburner program. The results on top video cards from AMD and NVIDIA were taken as an indicator at resolutions of  1920x1080 and 2560x1600 with various anti-aliasing settings.

Testing at maximum memory GPU quality settings

 

The recommended amount of video memory usage for 1920x1080 resolution will be 1280 MB of video memory,  for 2560x1600 resolution - 2048 MB of video memory and for 3840x2160 resolution about 3076 MB of video memory. 

CPU test

      

We tested processor dependence on 15 models of basic configurations that are relevant today. The test was carried out in those places where the value of the video card for the game is minimal and its load was less than 99%, this time at a resolution of 1920x1080 with maximum graphics quality settings. Below is a video of a test segment of the gaming benchmark:

 

Testing at maximum quality settings 1920x1080 

 

The CPU performance in the gaming benchmark is simply no... Most likely this is due to the operation of the game on a system with Windows 8.1

Loading of processor cores at maximum quality settings 1920x1080 Intel % 

 

Loading of processor cores  at maximum quality settings 1920x1080 AMD % 

 

The game is capable of supporting up to 4 computational threads, but it is not able to fully utilize more than two cores.

RAM test

The test was conducted on the base configuration Core i 7 3970X@4.9 GHz with 16GB DDR3 2400 MGz pre-installed memory. All used RAM was taken as an indicator. The RAM test on the entire system was carried out on various test benches without running extraneous applications (browsers, etc.).

Testing the game's RAM consumption at various quality settings 

 

As we can see, at various quality settings, the amount of RAM consumed in Crysis is at the level of 650 megabytes.  

Testing system RAM consumption  

 

With a 4 GB system, Crysis consumes about 2.3 GB of RAM. In the presence of a system with 8 gigabytes, the RAM consumption of all RAM was 2.7 gigabytes. With a 16 GB system, total memory consumption was almost 3.0 GB.  

 

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