Gigabyte Radeon HD 4770 512MB

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.

Ahh, you’ve gotta love Crysis. This is a game that’s not entirely new, but it still manages to push even new hardware to its breaking point. In the case of our lowly HD 4770, the word “playable” was definitely paired up with “not” in my thinking when benchmarking. Well, unless you enjoy punishing yourself with sticky gameplay, at which point this performance might be fine.

Surprisingly, all it took for the game to become completely playable was by dropping the Gamer profile down to Mainstream. Our 19 FPS minimum could be better, but dips like that were rare, and sometimes on purpose as part of regular gameplay (during explosions, mainly). With an average FPS of almost 47, 1920×1080 on Mainstream is definitely the sweet spot here.