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Crysis demo performance in-depth

Published October 29, 2007
By Steven Walton

CPU Scaling Performance

Test System Specs: Hardware
- Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 (2.66GHz) LGA775
- Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.40GHz) LGA775
- Intel Core 2 Duo E6420 (2.13GHz) LGA775

- x2 1024MB Corsair XMS PC3-10600 CAS7 Module(s)

- ASUS P5E3 Deluxe (Intel X38)

- OCZ GameXStream (700 watt)

- Seagate 500GB 7200RPM (Serial ATA II)

- Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX (768MB)

Software
- Microsoft Windows XP Pro - 32bit (SP2)
- Nvidia Forceware (169.01)
- Intel System Drivers (8.4.0)

When benchmarking Crysis the demo appeared to generate very little CPU utilization. Using a Core 2 Duo E6700, the processor utilization would hover between 20-30% at times. Both cores did appear to be active though neither seemed to do a great deal, especially at the same time.

The processor utilization never really got above 45% which would indicate that the game is really only using one core. However, based on the CPU Scaling results it could also just mean that Crysis is not that processor intensive when you consider that a 1GHz drop in frequency only accounted for 2-4fps.

Unfortunately we did not have a quad-core CPU at hand for testing, but given the clear outlook in our results, we were more than surprised with these statements supposedly made by Crytek regarding CPU core scaling.