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 1600×1200 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 1280×800 or maybe 1600×1200 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
The GTX card was faster than the GTS 640MB card — though not by much. The benchmarks aren’t as directly comparable as we’d like, s we’ll leave a detailed analysis for our follow up. 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.
An 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.
For now though, I HIGHLY encourage everyone to head over to Fileshack and grab the Crysis demo now – you won’t be disappointed!
Please join us in the PCPer Gaming forum to talk about this new demo and our performance results!!
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