Let's spice it up a little. With mankind facing an alien cataclysm, your elite Delta force and North Korean forces combine, united by common humanity in a battle to save Earth. Graphically stunning, tactically challenging and always intensely immersive, Crysis sets player choice at the heart of its gameplay, with customizable tactical weaponry and adaptable armor allowing instant response to changing conditions. Judging from the downloadable demo, Crysis doesn't feel all that different from its predecessor, Far Cry. Both are set on an island. Both involve a latent (here in the demo, only briefly glimpsed) alien menace. Both bid you move more or less linearly through shaggy jungle areas, where the fact that you're progressing in a single direction is camouflaged by your ability to approach obstacles in your path any way you like. Think the "every time you play a situation yields radically different behaviors and results" approach in games like Rainbow Six Vegas or Gears of War except on more of a geographic scale.

Crysis is one of the first games out there which is multi-threaded and thus takes advantage of multiple cores inside a CPU. Above you can see the behavior mid-game. It's still a beginning though as the chart definitely shows that Crysis is more lenient towards processors with two cores or more.

Have a peek:

We selected 1024x768x32 with low image quality settings so we make sure we are not bottlenecking the graphics processor. Small note, we made use of NVIDIA's 169.09 driver, the recently released driver are a sheer bit faster. But for the sake of objective benchmarking we use the same driver revision as all other tests where done with as well.

So we can clearly see how powerful the QX9770 really is compared to a quad core q6600. We are looking purely at the effect of the processor, not graphics thus you need to focus at option 1024x768. In the long run it'll have an effect on overall game performance as well of course.

A tiny win for 780i here.

Once we go in-game and measure the performance at high quality settings we see the graphics card becoming bottleneck. Only at 10x7 you can notice a real difference. There was a 1 FPS difference between X38 and 780i, so that's again nothing.

Gaming: Call of Duty 4

Activision recently released Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the next installment in the popular war game series. Moving away from the World War II setting, Modern Warfare instead centers around a conflict involving Russia and the Middle East. And hey, you even get to die .. and then continue the game in the past.

For this benchmark we use disguise ourselves in the Ghillie suit, load up ACT II - All Ghillied up.
This particular level I liked the most. Not just for gameplay, yet also the intense and dense graphics utilized are breathtaking. Massive texturing, shaders and a serious amount of shadows are applied in this level to mask and hide as best as you can.

The reality is, and this is why I included this title plus performance results, modern games have way less of a performance hot than older games as you run into other bottlenecks more quickly. The bottleneck here is the graphics card.

It's amazing to see that with a 275 USD (Q6600) processor and a 1400 USD processor (QX9770) there hardly is noticeable difference. Interesting to see isn't it ?

Image Quality setting:

• 4x Anti Aliasing
• 16x anisotropic filtering
• All settings maxed out