Remember Far Cry? The sprawling outdoor 3D shooter from Crytek made waves back in 2004, not only for its unique twist on the first-person shooter formula, but also for its impressive graphics technology. It immediately became a staple benchmark for hardware reviewers and was able to push the best systems of the day down to "only" 45fps at 1600x1200 with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering applied. Of course, most gamers didn't have the hottest hardware available at the time, and were struggling to make the game look as good as the screenshots. Three years later, the team behind Far Cry gives us its spiritual successor: Crysis. It also features its fair share of sprawling outdoor environments, impressive enemy AI, and vehicular combat. Only this time, the graphics are even more impressive. In an effort to make sure Crysis stays relevant on all the great hardware coming out for the next couple of years, Crytek made the game forward-looking. Perhaps, too forward-looking.

Crysis supports DirectX 10 (as well as DX9), and at its highest quality settings, it's able to push modern hardware so hard that almost nothing short of an overclocked dual-graphics system can run the game at its maximum settings without turning into a slideshow. Crysis has a pair of built-in benchmarks—here we will show you how we run the GPU benchmark to test graphics cards, and give you the disappointing outlook of how well modern cards run the game. Continued...

Final Thoughts

No matter which graphics card you have, you're not going to be able to set Crysis to its Very High settings—the ones that generated all those impressive preview screenshots—and run the game smoothly at a resolution above 1280x1024. In fact, you won't even get 1280x1024 without having two really good graphics cards working together in SLI or CrossFire mode. It's not often we see a game run so slowly on even top-end hardware, and we feel really sorry for anyone with a $250 graphics card that's "only" a year old.

Certainly, Crysis will continue to be optimized. Crytek has promised a patch in the coming weeks that should improve performance, and driver developers at Nvidia and ATI are hard at work making the game run faster. Still, how much can we really hope for? If game patches make the game run 20% faster, and drivers another 20% faster, you can expect…what? Just over 30fps on your brand new GeForce 8800 GT at 1280x1024? In an effort to make a game that will continue to have top-notch graphics for the next couple of years, Crytek has succeeded in creating a game that no reasonable computer can play in a way that makes it look as the artists intende

BTW Fishy, the GT klaps the GTS under DX9. Considering no one in their right mind will be playing in DX10 with current hardware I reckon the GT is a good investment.