http://www.pcper.com/article. php?aid=470
First, I tested an NVIDIA 8800 GTX card on a system that consisted of the following:
* NVIDIA 680i Motherboard
* Intel Core 2 Duo E6600
* 2 x 1GB Corsair DDR2- 800
* NVIDIA 8800 GTX reference
* Raptor X hard drive
* Windows Vista (DX10)
Next, Jeremy reports results from his personal gaming system that uses an NVIDIA 8800 GTS 640MB:
* Asus P5N32E- SLI 680i
* Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
* 2 x 1GB OCZ DDR2-800
* EVGA 8800 GTS 640MB
* Raptor X hard drive
* Windows XP (DX9)
1920x1200 8800GTX 4xAA Very High setting Min Fps 5.7 Max 10.2 Avg 9.1
NV 8800 GTX Results DX10
For my testing of Crysis, I used some in-game scripts that were built by Crytek to benchmark the GPU and did timedemo-based run-throughs of an outdoor daylight level. That is not my preferred method of testing (though Jeremy did it right) but because of some time issues this seemed like the best choice at the time. And, since these demos were created and endorsed by Crytek, I felt they would be a better solution that creating our own demos.
For my tests, I ran at three different resolutions with both High and Very High in-game quality settings as well as with and without 4xAA enabled.
Starting at the low end, we can see clearly early on that Crysis is going to be a beast on PC gaming systems. This test system was using the top GPU in the enthusiast market as well as a pretty fast dual core CPU and we are still seeing 10x7 0xAA scores just barely breaking 40 FPS on average. The good news is though that enabling 4xAA didn't incur too much of a performance hit dropping us from 41.1 FPS to 38.8 – only 6% or so.
The Very High quality settings performance drops pretty dramatically – without AA it goes from 41.1 FPS to 29.2 FPS which is 40% lower. That being said, enabling 4xAA doesn't cause as large a performance deficit as I expected, taking us to 23.4 average FPS with a minimum of 11.
Moving up a couple steps to 1600x1200 resolution testing, you can see the 8800 GTX and E6600 processor are having some trouble getting playable frame rates even without antialiasing enabled. At the High IQ settings enabling AA gives the user a 28% performance hit and at Very High IQ settings the mark is at 28% as well. Unfortunately, playing the game at 11.9 FPS is just not an option so the performance levels here are only interesting from a scientific view.
I know it seems like a stretch, but why not try it at 1920x1200 as well, a very popular widescreen resolution? Without AA and IQ set at High, the average FPS is 24.4 – low but perhaps almost playable if you have a high tolerance – I don't. The decrease in performance follows the same downward step as we saw in our previous tests.
One interesting note from all this testing is that moving the IQ settings to Very High at any resolution looks to do more damage to your performance than keeping the IQ levels at High and then enabling 4xAA. In that regards, it looks like initially at least Very High settings are going to be out of reach for single GPU computers as we'd recommend High settings and a little AA for improvement in the IQ.
Analysis and Final Thoughts
As I said at the outset, this initial performance preview isn't as complete as we'd have liked but I was sure that users would want to see how some of these cards performed right away in this incredibly popular game demo. Our results with the 8800 GTX and 8800 GTS 640MB graphics boards from NVIDIA put us in both a state of euphoria and despair.
The euphoria comes from seeing the game in action – it is absolutely gorgeous and the game play is superb. The story line from what I have seen so far is both compelling and interesting, much more so that the original Far Cry was at this point. The graphics are just out of this world – the water is hyper-realistic and the overall quality of the foliage, the in-game characters, weapons, etc are just something you have to see, even if its at a slide show.
Which is where the despair comes in. You mean our 8800 GTX card couldn't run the game at 1600x1200 with any AA and still be a very enjoyable gaming experience? That's a great system though! All that being said, we knew this was going to be the case and have been preparing for it mentally. Your systems are not obsolete at all; CryEngine 2 does scale very well in fact. However, if you are used to just maxing out all the IQ bars turning up AA and running it at your LCD's full resolution, you are going to be disappointed. Hardcore gaming systems will be happy at something 1280x800 or maybe 1600x1200 with High quality levels and until we see upgrades from NVIDIA and AMD, that's going to be the extent of it.
8800 GTX and 8800 GTS Performance
Look at the performance from the 8800 GTX and the 8800 GTS 640MB cards compared to one another, we found some interesting inflections. For instance, at 1024x768 without AA, the 8800 GTS 640MB system out performed the GTX system. Yes, I know the testing process wasn't exactly the same, so we have to make some broader generalizations, but it would appear that the quad-core CPU that Jeremy used was in fact a factor in overall performance as the Crytek developers indicated.
We are definitely going to be doing more thorough GPU and CPU testing in the near future, though we might wait for NVIDIA's and AMD's drivers to mature before spending the many hours on testing.
Another interesting note that came from this weekend – NVIDIA acknowledged that SLI scaling on Crysis was some crippled for the time being. A new driver is going to be released that will help with it, but they are saying that Crytek has a couple of fixes of their own that need to be made for proper multi-GPU performance so again, we might want to wait for the final retail version of the software to really get into the multi-GPU capabilities of the engine.
Final Thoughts
Our initial impressions of Crysis are two fold: we are more than impressed at the quality of the game from a visual and game play stand point but we are also (expectedly) disappointed at the performance levels we saw with current top hardware. The good news though is that just like Crytek did with Far Cry, we can expect to see the new engine updated and modified enough to scale for several years into the future allowing gamers to continue to see image quality changes and features that are new down the road. After all, we'd rather have a game that has the ability to look better as hardware improves (and still looks awesome with current hardware at Medium and High settings) rather than one that is purposefully crippled to make high end users feel better.
