Crysis
Crysis is still one of the most GPU heavy games on the market today and is considered by many to be the standard that new hardware is measured against. Crysis has out of the box DX9 and DX10 support for Windows Vista, and we’ll be running it in both configurations for testing.
We used the ‘Crysis Benchmark Tool’ to benchmark Crysis. The “benchmark_gpu” timedemo was used. It loops around an island with lots of vegetation and water effects. We kept all settings at ‘high’ but left antialiasing disabled.
At 1680×1050 in Crysis, we’re finally starting to see some benefit from the extra memory. The Super+1GB is able to maintain some better minimum frame rates than the reference HD3850. The 9600GT does much better than the other two cards and is able to maintain a minimum framerate almost twice that of the HD3850s.
In DX10 mode, the Super+1GB starts to shine. Crysis clearly starts to crave more capacity at this point and the Super+1GB maintains a higher minimum frame rate.
World In Conflict
World in Conflict is a popular new strategy title from Sierra. There can be a lot going on at any given time and the game puts quite a strain on modern graphics cards. The game supports both DX9 and DX10 rendering. We’ll be testing in both configurations.
We used the ‘High’ quality preset, which provides the detailed configuration that you see below. Only the “Use DX10 Rendering” setting is disabled to test in DX9 mode.
Almost all of the cards choke quite a bit at the higher reoslutions, but the 9600GT outperforms the HD3850s by a significant margin.
In DX10 rendering mode, we see similar trends with lower frame rates.