Rated: 90% (2 votes)
Loading ...If it wasn’t for Crysis, would you need a new graphics card?
Clive Webster
Even a £135 256MB Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT can play modern games at 1,920 x 1,200 without sacrificing any image quality. All bar Crysis that is, which struggles to be playable on this card even at relatively low resolutions with detail settings turned down. With Nvidia co-operating with Crytek (the makers of Crysis) from an early point - giving them access to early GeForce 8800 cards, helping optimise game code drivers, and so on.
So, with other games easily playable even at very high resolutions and maximum detail settings, wouldn’t Nvidia need a reason for you to buy a new GeForce graphics card? And hopefully to spend more than £135. Enter Crysis, which demands some kind of monster PC to run with Very High settings at a decent resolution and frame rate. ‘Want to play Crysis?’ Nvidia asks, ‘then get yourself a pair of GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB cards…’
Surely, given that Nvidia has been so involved with the development of Crysis, it should have a card capable of playing it? Granted, this isn’t a consipracy of David Icke proportions, but is far more believable. What do you think?
A pair of GTS won’t even cut it, I have this set up
Core 2 Extreme Quad Core QX6850 3.0GHz
Memory: 4 (1GB DDR2-800)
Motherboard: ASUSTeK P5N32-E SLI
Dual NVIDIA GPUs: 2 SLI (NVIDIA GeForce 8800GTX Ultra 768Mb)
SoundMAX Integrated Digital HD Audio
Hard Drive(s): 2 Raid (Western Digital HD Raptor X/150GB SATA 10000rpm 16Mb)
Quattro 1000W Modular
Tuniq Tower 120 CPU Cooler
Zalman VF1000-LED VGA Cooler ZM-RHS88 VGA RAM Heatsink 2
2 YS-TECH FD1225 120mm Fans 2600RPM 105CFM
and I can’t even max the graphics.
I’m killed my ancient PC a couple of months ago by trying to change my northbridge heatsink with extreme manual mal-coordination. Since then I have brought a nice new 1920X1200 panel but am using a friends hand-me-down laptop to drive it. The first graphics card maker that releases a SINGLE card that can play Crysis on full detail at 1920X1200 or even 1680X1050 will IMMEDIATELY make me part with £180-250. Until someone does my money stays under my mattress.
Shame that ATi had no answer to Nvidia with their resurgent 3850 and 3870. Let’s see how the next batch of cards perform in two quarters, right now both companies have got to shift GPUs in rubbish economic conditions (annoying business always gets in the way), meaning high performance will take a back seat to whatever can be integrated or go into supermarket special PCs by the thousand.
I think graphics card manufacturers are going to have to start getting far cleverer. There is only so big you want a screen that you are going to sit 60cm from, once you have to start moving your head side to side you’ve gone too far! Sure they can start squeezing more pixals into the same area but even that will become pointless at some point. Without the need to push cards to higher and higher resolutions they are going to need a whole new set of reasons to get us to upgrade.
I have no intention of playing Crysis, I’m upgrading because sooner or later I’ll have to. I’m running an E6700 with an AGP X800XT and DDR RAM 
Yes, “a Ferrari engine in a Skoda” It’s an AS-Rock board and I can’t say enough nice things about it. However, I’m going to have to bite the bullet at some point
That said, the X800XT has done me proud since I bought it 2nd hand in Japan 2 years ago. In fact, the reason I’ve never upgraded since, is that until recently it’d cost me at least £100 to replace it with something of equal power, which given that I’d have to replace the motherboard and RAM too, didn’t seem like a sensible proposition.
Ken may have point about the economics, though I suspect that with Intel on their heels Nvidia will have to keep going forward just to stand still. Sadly, just like Elvis, I think “ATI has left the building”
I think you’re absolutely spot on Clive.
I think the difference between what is needed to play Crysis and what is available is quite staggering. The only other game to come close is MS flight simulator. Each time a new version is released, you simply cannot max it out on the current hardware and it’s usually at least 6-12 months before you can with a new generation of GPUs.
It’s incredibly dissapointing to be honest. From what I’ve played of the Demo it looks and plays very well indeed, but the fact that you can’t max it out even with £800 worth of GPU’s just says to me that something is very wrong or decidedly dodgy.
I absolutely refuse to buy a game that current hardware cannot run at my screen’s native resolution. Yes you can lower the resolution but why the hell would you want to do that? TFT’s look god aweful when you run them lower than native. For me the gaming experience is just as much about image quality as it is gameplay and I’m certainly not lowering my settings just to play through the game to say I’ve completed Crysis.
Personally I’m waiting until I have the hardware to play it at 1680×1050 with 8xAA and max in game settings, but if this conspiracy is true, then Nvidia got it arse about face and made Crysis 50% more difficult to run well than they needed to. I like saving up and splashing out on graphics cards every year or two, but I’ll be damned if I’m spending £400 on two GPU’s that can only manage medium settings.
“Surely, given that Nvidia has been so involved with the development of Crysis, it should have a card capable of playing it? Granted, this isn’t a consipracy of David Icke proportions, but is far more believable. What do you think?”
Incorrect. A single 8800 Ultra or GTX can get you a solid 20-25 FPS average at Very High provided you play at 1280 and have a decent quad-core CPU.
This whole “tut tut there’s no single card that can play Crysis Very High” is a complete old wives tale. Probably started by NVDA…
@ JT:
“A single 8800 Ultra or GTX can get you a solid 20-25 FPS average at Very High provided you play at 1280″
That’s exactly the point - TFTs need to be used at their native resolution, else they look crap. And 25fps MINIMUM at full detail is this magazine and community’s definition of “playable”. I’m not going to go into justifying that, because it’s done for me in the mag every month.
- The allegation wasn’t that Crysis was unplayable at say 2048×1536. The allegation was simply there isn’t a card capable of playing it. At 1280 (the “native res” of my TFT) that simply isn’t so.
- Acceptable FPS depends on the game. Agreed 25 min/60 avg for a twitch shooter. For a slower paced game like Crysis (stealth nano/large levels) or Splinter Cell lower is more than acceptable.
Have to agree with Sam Nixon…I’ve been looking to upgrade my Radeon 1950pro for a while but im gona wait for a while someone manages to make a reasonablely priced high end card (180-200) that will run Crysis on full detail with at least 1680-1080 resolution. That mite convince me to switch to vista too. Otherwise wots the point? i wont be able to play the best graphical game ‘as it’s meant to be played’ if i upgrade now.
9800Gx2 for the 1650×1050 personly i want 1920 x 1080 with at least x2 anti on. Before i abondon my old 8800gtx.
My overlcocked gtx will give me 1200×1024 for the start of the game then later i have to go to 1024×724 and x2 anti then for the supper big maps and the last level its just 1024×724. (all on veryhigh)
Although i could not even get high out of the last level at 1200×1024 that was a humbling experiance considering i payed 300 pounds for my graphics card.
Online i go for 1200×1024 and mid graphics.
You can get my 8800gtx or one like it for just 212 pounds i recon.