Page 9 - Crysis demo, 3DMark 06

Crysis - Single Player Demo

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.

You guys will hate it, but Crysis is such a GPU killer so to be able to measure CPU differences we need to take away the graphics card as a bottleneck. So we lowered the Crysis image quality settings (on a 8800 GTX far cryin out loud) to the lowest possible and started measuring. Have a peek:

So we can clearly see how powerful the QX9650 really is. 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.

3DMark06

So for 3DMark06 we did a couple of things differently. First off, we loaded two GeForce 8800 GTX graphics cards into the system and enabled them in SLI. The last time I tested this was with an E6800 processor on a similar system/ I maxed out at 14,000'ish points. Let's see what the QX9650 has in store.

That's pretty darn impressive right ? I mean a score of 16541 really doesn't suck. This is at default clock-speeds though. To make it a tad more interesting I made sure we also tested with these lovely four cores running at 4 GHz. Read and weep ladies and gentlemen .. read and weep.

So with a 4 GHz overclock on the processor we nearly achieve 20000 points in 3DMark06. This is with the graphics cards at default clocks I must add. So tweaking here and there a little would have gotten me over 20k

But I was merely trying to make a statement here. Alright we are going to wrap this up, onwards to the review my fellow Guru3D posse.