by Rob Williams on February 9, 2010 in Graphics & Displays
AMD’s clear goal at the moment is to finish rounding-off its HD 5000-series line-up in advance of NVIDIA’s Fermi launch, and so far, it’s doing a good job. It’s continuing its success in this goal with the release of the $80 Radeon HD 5570, a card that’s designed to offer stellar media capabilities along with reasonable gaming performance.
Like Call of Duty, Crysis is another series that doesn’t need much of an introduction. Thanks to the fact that almost any comments section for a PC performance-related article asks, “Can it run Crysis?”, even those who don’t play computer games no doubt know what Crysis is. When Crytek first released Far Cry, it delivered an incredible game engine with huge capabilities, and Crysis simply took things to the next level.
Although the sequel, Warhead, has been available for just about a year, it still manages to push the highest-end systems to their breaking-point. It wasn’t until this past January that we finally found a graphics solution to handle the game at 2560×1600 at its Enthusiast level, but even that was without AA! Something tells me Crysis will be de facto for GPU benchmarking for the next while.
Manual Run-through: Whenever we have a new game in-hand for benchmarking, we make every attempt to explore each level of the game to find out which is the most brutal towards our hardware. Ironically, after spending hours exploring this game’s levels, we found the first level in the game, “Ambush”, to be the hardest on the GPU, so we stuck with it for our testing. Our run starts from the beginning of the level and stops shortly after we reach the first bridge.
Crysis is brutal on high-end cards, and it’s only made worse on low-end cards. Let’s hear it for <15 FPS!
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NVIDIA GTX 295 1792MB (Reference)
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2560×1600 – Gamer, 0xAA
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19
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40.381
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ATI HD 5870 1GB (Reference)
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2560×1600 – Gamer, 0xAA
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20
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32.955
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ATI HD 5850 1GB (ASUS)
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2560×1600 – Mainstream, 0xAA
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28
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52.105
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NVIDIA GTX 285 1GB (EVGA)
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2560×1600 – Mainstream, 0xAA
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27
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50.073
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NVIDIA GTX 275 896MB (Reference)
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2560×1600 – Mainstream, 0xAA
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24
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47.758
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NVIDIA GTX 260 896MB (XFX)
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2560×1600 – Mainstream, 0xAA
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21
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40.501
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ATI HD 5770 1GB (Reference)
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2560×1600 – Mainstream, 0xAA
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20
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35.256
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NVIDIA GTX 250 1GB (EVGA)
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2560×1600 – Mainstream, 0xAA
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18
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34.475
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ATI HD 5750 1GB (Sapphire)
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1920×1080 – Mainstream, 0xAA
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21
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47.545
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ATI HD 5670 512MB (Reference)
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1920×1080 – Mainstream, 0xAA
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20
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35.103
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NVIDIA GT 240 512MB (ASUS)
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1920×1080 – Mainstream Detail, 0xAA
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19
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33.623
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ATI HD 5570 1GB (Sapphire)
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1920×1080 – Mainstream Detail, 0xAA
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17
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29.732
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NVIDIA GT 220 1GB (ASUS)
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1280×1024 – Minimum Detail, 0xAA
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26
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44.286
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ATI HD 5450 512MB (Reference)
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1280×1024 – Minimum Detail, 0xAA
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12
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31.495
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NVIDIA 210 512MB (ASUS)
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1024×768 – Minimum Detail, 0xAA
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15
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29.501
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Intel HD Graphics (Clarkdale)
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1024×768 – Minimum Detail, 0xAA
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10
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24.289
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Crysis is another title where I hate to go as low as 30 FPS, but at that point, the game is still very playable, so that’s where I kept it. That required us going to the Mainstream profile, so there’s still more lenience to go even lower if you crave the utmost performance.