Crysis

Crysis – Direct3D

Crysis Performance 1280x1024x32
Card	Min FPS	Max FPS
Athlon 64 X2 6000+ w/8800 GTX	20.7	35.4
Athlon 64 X2 6000+ w/8800 GT	18.7	32.8
Core 2 Extreme X6800 w/8800 GTX	21.2	35.6
Core 2 Extreme X6800 w/8800 GT	18.9	32.5
Athlon 64 X2 5200+ w/8800 GT	13.7	32.6
Athlon 64 X2 4000+ w/8800 GT	6.7	33
Core 2 Duo E4300 w/8800 GT	7.7	32.7

Crysis Performance 1920x1200x32
Card	Min FPS	Max FPS
Athlon 64 X2 6000+ w/8800 GTX	18.2	29.5
Athlon 64 X2 6000+ w/8800 GT	15.6	26.8
Core 2 Extreme X6800 w/8800 GTX	19.5	29.1
Core 2 Extreme X6800 w/8800 GT	15.3	26.8
Athlon 64 X2 5200+ w/8800 GT	13.5	26.7
Athlon 64 X2 4000+ w/8800 GT	6.8	26.7
Core 2 Duo E4300 w/8800 GT	8.5	26.5

Notes

The same general trends repeat again in Crysis, but here we wanted to pay more attention to the minimum/maximum frame rate data, which is why we included that info at 2 resolutions here. See how the minimums are significantly lower for the budget rigs? This even occurs at 1920x1200 when the high-end and budget rigs are equally equipped with GeForce 8800 GT GPUs. Under these conditions the cards should be performing similarly, including their minimum frame rates, but instead what we’re seeing in Crysis is that the budget rigs consistently hit lower minimums, including higher resolutions where we should be GPU-bound.

We checked it out with FRAPS running in the background and it appears to be an isolated case that occurs towards the beginning of the Crysis flyby as you’re going across the beach – in this case the frame rate with the budget CPUs takes a significant dip, whereas the high-end rigs don’t see their performance suffer nearly as significantly. For the remainder of the flyby the budget cards deliver pretty good performance numbers, there are no significant spikes in frame rate like we see in the early portion of the demo. In other words, we wouldn’t be too concerned by the minimum frame rate data, yes, there is a dip in performance, but it doesn’t occur consistently throughout the demo run. It’s just an isolated dip that occurs once and the remainder of the time the budget system performs comparably to the higher-end PCs.