HANDS ON GUIDE

Tweaking Crysis

Sorry to break this to you, but you won't find a PC that can play Crysis at Very High settings for £447. However, if it's any consolation, you won't find one for £2,000 either, such is the insane visual magnificence of Crytek's jungle war zone. What you can acquire with this PC, though, is a happy compromise - and a game, it must be said, that still looks incredible.

Start by overclocking your CPU and your graphics card, patching Crysis to version 1.1 and then going to the game's graphics options. We found that this PC was happiest running the game at 1,024 x 768, which may not be a super-high resolution, but it looks pretty decent. Now go to your Advanced options and put everything on Medium except for the Texture Quality, Physics Quality, Shaders Quality, Particles Quality and Water Quality, each of which can be set to High.

This provides a happy medium - the settings that make the biggest difference (or have little impact on performance) can be on High without killing your frame rates. From the results above, you can see that overclocking the CPU and graphics card made a massive difference to performance in Crysis, and while the minimum of 22fps isn't ideal (we usually specify a minimum of 25fps), we found that the game was just smooth enough to play at these settings. For more information, see our guide to tweaking Crysis.

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