AMD ATI Radeon 3850 & 3870 review - Page 10 - Crysis

Crysis - Single Player Demo

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.

Above are two reference images, the upper one being a screenshot at medium image quality (which is still really good). The lower one is a screenshot taken at very high quality settings. For that, we'd need CrossfireX to be honest. But look at that... that's the future of gaming my fellow Guru's.

Oh yeah, you probably want to hear about how it performs, right?

Image Quality setting:

• 0x Anti Aliasing
• 16x anisotropic filtering

So we ditched the internal benchmark for the game as I felt that the in-game gameplay performance does not match up with a large fly-by at all. We took the beach scene and started using fraps to measure the actual framerate. Now we tested the AMD ATI cards along with a 8800 GT in three (in-game) settings, medium quality, high quality and very high quality.

Above, medium image quality settings (as set in the game properties). At medium IQ setting you're good to go up-to 1600x1200 on a 3870. It's do-able with a 3850 as well, yet you are more comfortable at 1280x1024 with such an adapter.

For the sake of reference we included an 8800 GT in there, this is massive overclocked version from Inno3D (review will be up soon) with a big overclock frequency of 700 MHz on the core and 2000 MHz on memory.

At high quality setting, which looks brilliant we are stuck at 10x7 on all cards 12x10 is do-able, yet barely with the 3870 though.

And last but not least, the mother of all that is gorgeous in 3D graphics quality, the very high setting mode. Triple SLI and CrossfireX will probably not even be enough to run decent numbers here in a higher resolution.