MSI N280GTX-T2D1GOC, GeForce GTX 280 Redux
Of all the games we test against various graphics cards, Crysis is easily the most demanding and also offers some of the most cutting-edge rendering effects seen in 3D game engines currently. In fact, Crysis is so demanding, industry insiders have coined the phrase "...but can it play Crysis?", when evaluating new 3D graphics gear. Honestly, we have mixed emotions about the game. It certainly looks great but we're of the opinion that the lower frame rates we see (along with its occasional instability), don't scale in conjunction with the image quality gains. In other words, we think Crytek has some work to do with respect to their code base as well.
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If you're at all into enthusiast computing, the highly anticipated single player, FPS smash-hit Crysis, should require no introduction. Crytek's game engine produces some stunning visuals that are easily the most impressive real-time 3D renderings we've seen on the PC to date. The engine employs some of the latest techniques in 3D rendering like Parallax Occlusion Mapping, Subsurface Scattering, Motion Blur and Depth-of-Field effects, as well as some of the most impressive use of Shader technology we've seen yet. In short, for those of you that want to skip the technical jib-jab, Crysis is a beast of a game. We ran the full game patched to v1.2 with all of its visual options set to 'High' to put a significant load on the graphics cards being tested A custom demo recorded on the Island level was used throughout testing. |
With Crysis on high image quality and at 1920X1200 resolution, you can see that all of cards we tested, though they are some of the fastest on the market today, all broke a sweat trying to handle the rendering workload of this game engine. The GTX 280 cards, including MSI's N280GTX all stacked up together right on top of the AMD Radeon HD 4870 X2, partially due to the fact that AMD still has some driver optimization ahead of them for this game and multi-GPU configurations. As you can see, the GeForce 9800 GX2 dual-GPU card actually offer a bit more headroom but nothing too significant.
