Crysis and SLI
Following last week's initial performance review of Crysis, which tested the full version of the game again the official single player demo, we decided to examine the PC title on another system to see how Crysis performs with the benefit of two GPUs instead of one. The initial performance test was run on an Alienware Intel Quad Core desktop with a 32-bit version of Windows Vista, 4 GB of RAM, and a single Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX (768 MB), and the results showed that Crysis is extremely taxing for even top line hardware (for more on the demo vs. full version results, check out the article).
Many wondered how much a SLI or Crossfire-enable system with two GPUs would improve the game's performance, so we installed the game on a new Intel Quad Core-based Alienware desktop. Here are the specs:
• Intel Q6700 @ 2.66 GHz
• Windows Vista Home Premium (32-bit version)
• Two SLI-enabled Nividia GeForce 8800 GTX @ 769 MB (total available graphics memory 1535 MB)
• 2 GB of RAM
The primary differences between the system used for the first performance test and this test is that the first Alienware desktop was overclocked and had just one 8800 GTX card and 4 GB of RAM, whereas the system for this series of tests has two SLI-enabled 8800 GTX cards but only 2 GB of RAM. We began our first round of tests last week, which got off to a rocky start because of driver issues. The system suffered a couple of crashes, which resulted in the same message from Vista's Problem Report and Solutions page: "Problem Caused By Nividia Graphics Driver." The page recommended downloading the latest drivers from Nvidia, which we thought we had already done. We double checked, and according to Nvidia's own system check, we had indeed downloaded the latest driver.
However, what Nvidia didn't tell us on that system check was that it had released a beta driver for Crysis on the game's launch day. We eventually downloaded the ForceWare 169.09 driver, which is highly recommended for running Crysis on an SLI-enabled system. Once installed, we ran through the same section of the game for three tests; we started recording frame rates the minute the player jumps out of the aircraft at the beginning of Crysis, and ended the test section with the first cut scene where the player finds his teammate Aztec dead, hanging from a tree, amongst several slain North Korean soldiers.
For the first test, we raised the resolution to the maximum 1680x1050 with 4X AA. We decided to run the game's own system check for optimal settings, and sure enough, Crysis changed all advanced settings to very high. Here are the results:
Obviously, an average FPS of 18 was disappointing but understandable since all of the game's settings were at very high. The game struggled mightily in some areas but wasn't completely unplayable, in our opinion. Then again, we were only testing a small section of the game that involved minimal combat and no explosions or moving vehicles. What concerned us more was the fact that the game itself jacked up the settings. What kind of system check was Crysis running on this Alienware system? We decided to turn SLI off and run the game's optimal settings feature again to see if it still turned all of the advanced settings to very high. Sure enough, it did. This unfortunate fact gives us serious reservations about the reliability and accuracy of the optimal settings feature for Crysis.
That said, we ran the second test again with SLI turned off. The game was rendered unplayable with an average FPS of 12.23. That's not a surprise, but it's important to note that whatever system check Crysis runs on your machine will not detect SLI functionality. In essence, the optimal setting feature for this game is pretty much worthless. We turned SLI back on and tinkered with advanced settings to find a combination that offered good graphics quality along with acceptable frame rates. One combination in particular had texture, object, shaders, and postprocessing settings at high, shadows, physics, and sound on low, and the rest of the settings at medium. This combination delivered an average FPS of 41.58, which was acceptable but not spectacular considering the small section of the game we tested.
Clearly, Crysis is going to be extremely challenging to run at a high resolution with anti-aliasing on and advanced settings at very high. In fact, we may not yet have the hardware - let alone the drivers and necessary software - to run this game at very high settings with an average of 60 FPS or better (if anyone out there does, please let me know). The Alienware desktop did a fine job running this game at lower settings. In fact, we when ran other recent games on this system, including Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, we had absolutely no trouble turning up the setting to the maximum levels and playing them smoothly and without any noticeable drop in frame rates.
Crysis is another story. The game, while gorgeous in spurts, doesn't appear to be effectively optimized yet, especially for DirectX 10. There's the Nvidia beta driver, for one. There's also the unfortunate conclusion many have reached regarding the game's performance on Vista, which is to say Crysis performs much better on XP than the newest version of Windows. And there's also the fact that you can hack an XP version of the game and enable very high settings in the game, which were initially reserved for DX10 only. Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli said in an interview with fan site InCrysis last week that an official patch for the game would be released within 7-14 days, which will hopefully boost frame rates for many PCs out there. Stay tuned for tests on Tom's Games.
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