The system-killer: Crysis 3
Anyone with a passing interest in graphics will know that Crysis 3, Crytek's graphical masterpiece, was released in the UK last Friday. The Crysis franchise boasts leading-edge graphics that push the latest PC hardware to the very limit, though whether this is due to graphical lushness or unoptimised coding is open to debate. But such are the demands of the CryEngine 3, often making quality systems slow to a crawl, that it's become somewhat popular to ask the Internet meme of whether a particular PC 'can run Crysis?'
PC hardware has markedly improved in performance since Crysis 2 was released. One can purchase GeForce TITAN or Radeon HD 7970 GHz graphics cards, and given enough budget, add a second or even third card for multi-GPU rendering. Appreciating that the world's fastest single-GPU card, GeForce TITAN, was also released this week, we've taken the liberty of evaluating Crysis 3 performance on some tasty hardware, as shown in the table below.
GPU Comparisons |
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| Graphics Card | GPU Clock (MHz) |
Stream Processors |
Shader Clock (MHz) |
Memory Clock (MHz) |
Memory Bus (bits) |
Graphics Driver | Approx Price | |
| NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN 6GB SLI | 837 (876) | 2,688 x 2 | 837 (876) | 6,008 | 384 x2 | GeForce 314.09 | £1,660 | |
| NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN 6GB | 837 (876) | 2,688 | 837 (876) | 6,008 | 384 | GeForce 314.09 | £830 | |
| NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 4GB | 915 (1,019) | 3,072 | 915 (1,019) | 6,008 | 256 x 2 | GeForce 314.07 WHQL | £750 | |
| NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 2GB | 1,006 (1,058) | 1,536 | 1,006 (1,058) | 6,008 | 256 | GeForce 314.07 WHQL | £375 | |
| AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz 3GB | 1,000 (1,050) | 2,048 | 1,000 (1,050) | 6,000 | 384 | Catalyst 13.2 beta 6 | £350 | |
| Club3D Radeon HD 7990 6GB | 900 | 2,048 x 2 | 900 | 5,500 | 384 x 2 | Catalyst 13.2 beta 6 | £730 | |
| AMD Radeon HD 7970 3GB CrossFire | 925 | 2,048 x 2 | 925 | 5,500 | 384 x 2 | Catalyst 13.2 beta 6 | £600 | |
The rest of the test system's configuration can be found here.
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Crysis 3 is a beautiful-looking game that continues to tax high-end systems. We've FRAPS'd a 30-second section near the start of the game, with lashing rain, numerous reflections and full DX11 pomp on show.
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We've run the seven configurations at 1,920x1080, 2,560x1,600 and three-screen 5,760x1,080 resolutions. With GeForce GTX TITAN SLI in the mix alongside GeForce GTX 690, Radeon HD 7990 and twin HD 7970s - representing a truly high-end ensemble - you may wonder why we've chosen to run with high quality settings instead of very high quality. The reason, as you'll see on the next page, is that even these monster graphics setups aren't able to run very high quality settings smoothly.
