Testing Notes & Methodology

Given that Crysis 2 is a DX9 title, nosotros thought it would exist interesting to encounter how some older cards perform, such every bit the Radeon Hd 4850 and GeForce GTX 260. In total we have tested 25 graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia. The latest official drivers were used for all graphics cards.

We used Fraps to measure frame rates during a minute of gameplay from the showtime unmarried-histrion level called Second Take chances for all our benchmarks. The scene is quite busy and should provide a fair representation of the performance you can expect to see on Crysis 2.

Our Intel Core i7 2600K processor was overclocked to 4GHz when testing the GPUs to remove any possible CPU bottleneck. The game was tested at three resolutions: 1680x1050, 1920x1200 and 2560x1600 using the High, Very High and Extreme visual presets.

Before we get rolling, here are a few notes from Crytek about the game's quality settings:

"The lowest PC spec, 'High', is almost the same as the spec used on consoles, besides per-platform differences, such every bit dissimilar texture formats for render targets and different normal map formats on PS3 due to lack of 3Dc back up. PC specs also feature improved texture quality, since streaming for PC has not been used due to the vast memory resources bachelor. Anisotropic filtering is enabled for all specs, while on PS3 it is dynamically adapted and goes up to 16x anisotropic, and on Xbox 360 it is limited to 4x anisotropic in order to reduce the performance cost.

Although many multiplatform engines oft practice not use AA on certain platforms, CryENGINE 3 uses a form of amortized MSAA reminiscent of OpenGL accumulation buffer approaches, called Post MSAA.

Such an approach works past accumulating sub-samples over frames and reprojecting them to the current frame. It should non be confused with 'temporal antialiasing' commonly used on 60 fps games that just practice a linear blending and hence take ghosting for every pixel. The Post MSAA approach is very general and allows for a sub-pixel accuracy solution on all platforms at a cost of simply 1ms on consoles, and less than 0.two ms on PCs at 1080p resolutions.

Due to its sub-pixel accurateness, it minimizes moiré patterns and visible shimmering on surfaces with loftier frequency characteristics (fences, grids, etc) commonly visible in EdgeAA/MLAA or similar techniques. It works on alpha tested geometry, and performs shader anti-aliasing i.eastward. on surfaces using Parallax Occlusion mapping, or similar aliasing decumbent techniques. It also performs mail service-tone mapping without dissentious HDR quality on high contrast areas like regular hardware MSAA approaches (pre-DX11).

Such a technique is quite a novelty in the video game industry and it'due south very probable Crytek volition release improved versions as information technology has potential to also exist merged with different techniques - for instance, information technology's currently also combined with Nvidia'due south FXAA in 'Extreme' spec, in guild to better quality further with sub-pixel accuracy results from mail service MSAA."

Although SLI appeared to exist working very well when using the GeForce GTX 590, the Crossfire performance of the Radeon HD 6990 was very poor and plain needs piece of work.

We understand many of you lot like to accept CPU scaling performance included along with graphics, and so we clocked our Core i7 2600K processor at a range of frequencies between 2GHz and 4GHz to see how that affected operation. Nosotros besides ran like tests using a range of processors from AMD and Intel to see how they compared.

Examination Organization Specs
- Intel Core i7 2600K @ 4GHz
- x2 2GB G.Skill DDR3 PC3-12800 (CAS vii-7-vii-20)
- Asus P8P67 Deluxe (Intel P67)
- OCZ ZX Series 1250w
- Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB (SATA 6Gb/s)
- GeForce GTX 590 (3072MB)
- GeForce GTX 580 (1536MB)
- GeForce GTX 570 (1280MB)
- GeForce GTX 560 Ti (1GB)
- GeForce GTX 550 Ti (1GB)
- GeForce GTX 480 (1536MB)
- GeForce GTX 470 (1280MB)
- GeForce GTX 460 (1GB)
- GeForce GTX 285 (1GB)
- GeForce GTX 260 (896MB)
- GeForce GTS 450 (1GB)
- GeForce 9800 GT (512MB)
- Radeon HD 6990 (4096MB)
- Radeon HD 6970 (2GB)
- Radeon HD 6950 (2GB)
- Radeon HD 6870 (1GB)
- Radeon HD 6850 (1GB)
- Radeon HD 5870 (1GB)
- Radeon HD 5850 (1GB)
- Radeon Hard disk 5830 (1GB)
- Radeon HD 5770 (1GB)
- Radeon HD 5750 (1GB)
- Radeon HD 5670 (512MB)
- Radeon HD 4890 (1GB)
- Radeon Hd 4850 (1GB)
- Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate 64-scrap
- Nvidia Forceware 266.66
- Nvidia Forceware 266.59
- Nvidia Forceware 267.71
- ATI Catalyst xi.ii
- ATI Catalyst xi.iv Preview