Crysis (2007) - retro test GPU

Year of construction: November 13, 2007
Genre: Action (Shooter) / 3D / 1st Person
developer: Crytek
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Publisher in Russia: Soft Club

People have more than once imagined the end of the world, attributing the fatal role of the executioner to a flood, a terrible disease, or a nuclear war. In fact, all turned out to be somewhat more exotic. An asteroid that crashed onto one of the remote islands turned out to be a huge spaceship capable of completely changing the Earth's climate. The detachments of North Korea and the United States that went to study the anomaly turned out to be the only defenders of humanity. Get ready to face an unknown enemy - you have a decisive role to play in this battle!

The new exciting fantasy action movie Crysis is a brilliant creation of Crytek Studios, famous for the FarCry project! Players will become fighters of an elite American unit and go to the island where an alien starship was discovered. The world around us is constantly changing, vast territories are instantly covered with ice, hurricanes and tornadoes are raging all around. But most importantly, there are those on the island who are going to exterminate humanity! 

This subsection of our review highlights the main graphical aspects of this game. Particular attention is paid to the version of the graphics engine used, the version of the API used, graphic settings and the quality of development of the main visual aspects.

Crysis is supported by major operating systems Windows, which includes Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8. Other operating systems are not currently supported by developers and will not be supported. 

The priority and main graphics API for Crysis is DirectX 10. 

CryTek, having sold all the rights to FarCry, decided to develop a new version of the engine, and along the way create a new cult series called Crysis. CryEngine 2 is written in the same way as its predecessor in C++, but perhaps its main difference is that it is not cross-platform. The only platform it supports is OS Windows. To be fair, they tried to port it to the 7th generation consoles - PS3, XboX 360 and Wii. There was even a closed testing of the capabilities of this engine, but unfortunately, the consoles never saw this engine. CryEngine 2 at the time of its release is the most technologically advanced and photorealistic engine compared to its competitors. 

To write the engine, the DirectX 9 and 10 application programming interface was used. The CryEngine 2 engine contains and improves all the technologies of its predecessor, CryEngine, and also contains many new and innovative graphics technologies. The development of all levels also remained at its best, even improved, CryEngine 2 all is just as good in huge open and closed locations, but a resource pumping system also appeared that made it possible to fill levels as the player progresses.

The rendering engine is no exception. Depending on the version of DirectX, as well as on the choice of 32-bit or 64-bit system, the engine should provide different rendering. Sometimes developers do not use the capabilities of a 64-bit system or a more modern API. Powerful instrumentation features allow the developer to analyze engine performance in real time, create detailed memory usage reports, and perform automated end-to-end monitoring of each layer to obtain consistent and complete test results. 

Crytek benefited from the 64-bit architecture, because the size of the game level has not decreased since the days of FarCry, therefore the resource costs for drawing it have increased significantly. This led 32-bit systems to limit RAM and support for 64-bit systems easily solved this problem. All engine components are Crytek's own developments. The CryEngine 2 engine supports and actively uses multi-threading in multi-core processors and processors using multi-threading technology. Among other interesting features, we can also note the light projection technology, which supports not only HDR and dynamic shadows, but also the calculation of light as a post-rendering effect; this lighting technology is called SSAO. The SSAO algorithm operates in real time and simulates diffuse indirect lighting and corresponding dimming in three-dimensional virtual space.

 

The physics engine was developed by CryTek themselves and is called CryPhysics - a multi-threaded real-time physics engine integrated into CryEngine 2. The enormous functionality of the created technology allowed for a variety of manipulations with physics and could be applied to almost all objects on the level, including trees and vegetation, and could realistically simulate the reaction of these objects to influences such as gravity, wind, explosions, friction and collisions with other objects. Probably CryTek needed its own physics to achieve optimal results from its development.

Flexible vegetation that responds to wind, rain or character movement, realistically modeled interactive rope bridges, and physically controlled animation of creature tentacles are just some of the capabilities of advanced rope physics.

Dynamic physics allows you to interact with any arbitrary surrounding object or shape, selectively destroy buildings, trees or other objects, and then interact with the resulting debris and remains. The engine uses pre-defined characteristics of faults or destruction of objects.

The new CryEngine 2 character animation system greatly improves the real-time animation of people, models and vehicles over the CryEngine animation system. A fully integrated character editor provides animation previews inside the Sandbox 2 editor. Character customization system and parametric skeletal animation create more unique and lifelike NPCs.

Using adaptive keyframe compression technology, CryEngine 2 can adjust the level of compression to match the precision needed for any given animation. Thanks to compression, which slightly distorts the precision of movement, it is possible to free up at least 90% of the RAM. 

Crysis has a wide range of graphic settings. You can also change the settings according to four main sub-items - low average, high and maximum.

Below we have provided screenshots of the game at various graphics settings, where our readers can see the difference between the minimum, medium and maximum graphics quality settings. 

The difference between graphics settings is simply amazing, the changes are simply huge...

In 4K, Crysis looks like a real nextgen.

Activating full-screen anti-aliasing does not completely eliminate surface irregularities and its use does not have the desired effect.

Crysis is a game that hardly anyone has heard of. This project is a pretty good first-person shooter with a very significant difference, namely the graphical component, which was years ahead of its time and even outdoes modern AA games.

Of course, now the game looks great, but 7 years ago its release could be compared to a real graphical explosion that brought any top-end gaming hardware to its knees. But at the same time, it should be noted that for minimal settings a very democratic system was required, at the level of the requirements of the original Far Cry for medium settings. 

Next, we will move directly to gaming tests and determine what impact this game has on modern computer hardware. 

All video cards were tested at maximum graphics quality using the MSI Afterburner program. The purpose of the test is to determine how video cards from different manufacturers behave under the same conditions. The average and minimum FPS were taken as the performance indicator. Below is a video of the test section of the gaming benchmark:   

Our graphics cards were tested at separate screen resolutions of 1920x1080, 2560x1600 and 3840x2160 at maximum graphics quality settings allowed by Crysis. SLI and AMD CrossFireX are sufficiently supported by the game, showing excellent scalability. 

Testing at maximum quality settings 1920x1080 

With these settings An acceptable FPS indicator was shown by video cards of the Radeon HD 6850 or GeForce GTX 560 level. The optimal solutions will be  Radeon HD 6870 or GeForce GTX 560.

Testing at maximum quality settings 2560x1600

With these settings An acceptable FPS indicator was shown by video cards of the Radeon HD 6970 or GeForce GTX 750 Ti level. The optimal solutions will be  Radeon HD 7950 or GeForce GTX 760.

Testing at maximum quality settings 3840x2560

With these settings An acceptable FPS indicator was shown by video cards of the Radeon R9 290X or GeForce GTX 780 level. The optimal solutions will be Radeon R9 290X or GeForce GTX 780 SLI.

Testing of video memory consumed by the game was carried out by the program MSI Afterburner. The indicator was based on results on top video cards from AMD and NVIDIA with separate screen sizes 1920x1080 and 2560x1600 with different anti-aliasing settings.

Testing at maximum memory quality settings GPU

The recommended amount of video memory usage for a resolution of 1920x1080 will be 1280 MB of video memory, for a resolution of 2560x1600 - 2048 MB of video memory and for a resolution of 3840x2160 about 3076 MB of video memory. 

We tested processor dependence on 15 models of basic configurations that are relevant today. The test was carried out in those places where the video card value for the game is minimal and its load was less than 99%, this time at a resolution of 1920x1080 with maximum graphics quality settings. Below is a video of the test segment of the gaming benchmark:

Testing at maximum quality settings 1920x1080 

The CPU performance in the gaming benchmark is just nothing... Most likely it is related to the game running on a system c Windows 8.1

Loading of processor coresat maximum quality settings 1920x1080 Intel% 

Loading of processor cores at maximum quality settings 1920x1080 AMD% 

The game can support up to 4 computing threads, but is not able to fully utilize more than two cores.

The test was carried out on the basic configuration of Core i 7 3970X@4.9 GHz with 16GB DDR3 2400 MGz pre-installed memory. The entire used operational memory was taken as an indicator. The RAM test on the entire system was carried out on various test benches without launching third-party applications (browsers, etc.).

Testing the game's RAM consumption at various quality settings 

As we can see, with various quality settings, the amount of RAM consumed in Crysis is at the level of 650 megabytes.  

Testing system RAM consumption  

On a 4GB system, Crysis consumes about 2.3GB of RAM. In the presence of a system with 8 gigabytes, the RAM consumption of all RAM was 2.7 gigabytes. With a 16 GB system, the total memory consumption was almost 3.0 gigabytes.  

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