Crysis demo performance in-depth

Crysis is a highly anticipated first person shooter developed exclusively for the PC by Crytek, the makers of the award-winning Far Cry. The demo offers PC gamers a quick look at what will possibly be the most advanced FPS ever created, you just have to swallow the huge 1.8GB download first. I'm sure many will agree that the demo is well worth the download though, offering the entire first level of the game which represents "roughly 45 minutes" of pure gameplay.

Today we are going to see how the various mid-range and high-end graphics cards handle this new and exciting first person shooter. There will also be some brief visual quality comparisons along with some CPU scaling and DX9 vs. DX10 performance charts. The single-player demo supports both DX10 and DX9 rendering in Vista while Windows XP users are limited to DX9. While the game has been said to include 64-bit support, the demo can only be run in 32-bit mode, so there are no 32-bit vs. 64-bit comparisons just yet.

http://www.techspot.com/article/73-crysis-performance/

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crysis.exe in Bin64 directory runs in 64-bit mode just fine here.

No, you can move/delete/rename the *.sfd files in Crysis SP Demo \ Game \ Localized \ Video.

Yeah, it could be that most people use "high performance" settings. I use "high quality". That is, vsync always on etc.

Vista Ultimate x64, 8800 GTS, ForceWare 163.69 (WHQL).

Wow, what an excellent article
Thanks allot for the hard work Steve!!!

Now I'm off to install Vista 64 bit so I can see if I can get over 25FPS with my crazily overclocked 7900GT (720/880 core/mem, 520/750 is default)
I installed a nice voltmod on it over a year ago that I haven't even felt the need to test untill now
Core now getting 1.5v instead of 1.2v :haha:

That 8800GT is high on my buy list, tho I will probably wait for the new G92 GTS instead
Would be nice if my watercooler would fit too but I don't think it will

I think my sarcasm detector is broken. Aren't you supposed to stay in Win2k?

Well, I said I would never "upgrade" to XP, so I win

I'd prefer to run Crysis in Windows 2000 (I think I would get better performance)
However I didn't manage to fix it, after giving it some dll's etc it just gave me a generic "memory could not be read" error message so no way to troubleshoot further without debugging tools...

First it needs a newer POWRPROF.dll to get rid of this error message:
"The procedure entry point ReadProcessorPwrScheme could not be located in the dynamic link library POWRPROF.dll"

Then it needs a newer dbghelp.dll to get rid of this error message
"The procedure entry point SymFromAddr could not be located in the dynamic link library dbghelp.dll"

But once that is done it just gives me a generic "memory could not be read" error message

EDIT; Wasn't so impossible afterall

About RAM usage; the demo uses ca 1.4GB of memory, virtual address usage is only 1.6GB tho so that is nice (once you hit 2GB in any 32bit OS the application will fail because that is the max, 2GB for app and 2GB for OS/Kernel)

This memory usage is with a 256MB 7900GT and all on medium/1024x768
I can imagine what will happen to the RAM usage once I hit 1600x1200 which is my LCD panels native resolution
And also run everything on very high...
So yea, I'm making space on one of my hardrives for a new Windows Vista 64 bit install. Will post what performance results I get...

I'm in serious need of a hardware upgrade if I want to run this game properly... the Athlon X2 4400+ I run does get hammered with the demo (both cores), perhaps it's starting to show real life difference compared to the newer Core 2 Duos.

With my system specs (see the drop down next to my name), that is running with either a GeForce 7800GT or a 8800 GTS, I get what I consider to be poor frame rates. The 8800 GTS on 1680x1050 with some medium and some other low settings is kind of playable...

Before the end of the year, Quad Core and GeForce 9 *?* here I come!

I played it last night at 1280x800 with most everything on Medium and Water and maybe something else on High. It played really well, I think I could bump the resolution up. Not sure what my FPS were. I did notice higher CPU than I expected based on the review and what I see in these posts. CPU usage was pretty irratic but was in the mid to upper 90s on one of the cores fairly often. Perhaps tonight I'll play it again but not disable my 2nd monitor off so I can watch CPU usage in real time. I didn't get a chance to look at it until after exited out of the game.

http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic90831.html

There, now the sarcasm mode is off again

I'd prefer to run Crysis in Windows 2000 (I think I would get better performance)
Vista 32bit, 1024x768, everything on medium nVidia 169.01 drivers:
25.75

Windows 2000 SP4, 1024x768, everything on medium nVidia 169.01 drivers: (unlike Vista there is browsers, chat clients, hex editors, debuggers, µTorrent, Motherboard monitor and F@H running in the background (49 processes to be exact, default is what, below 20?))
34.94fps

/Sarcasm on again:
Ohh, 2000 is only 35% faster than Vista, I think I will continue to run Vista
/Sarcasm off

Have you tried the latest 169.04 drivers? Those brought a considerable improvement for me in Vista.

Will do, most people on Guru3D said not much difference tho ca ~1fps increase

Graphics card drivers for all tests are nVidia Forceware v169.04
nForce drivers are v6.86 for Win2K & XP / v15.01 for Vista
Creative drivers are v2.09.0007 dated 30 Oct 06 for Win2K & XP / v2.15.0002 for Vista dated 9 Oct 07
Resolution is 1024x768 and all settings are on medium.
All tests are run in the bin32 or bin64 folder for each respective system using the "Benchmark_GPU.bat". The best score from the 4 runs is chosen.
All operating systems are clean installed with all updates and service packs applied. Vista also has KB940105 installed. (And my Crysis Win2K fix is of course applied in the Windows 2000 test)
System specs for all tests are;

CPU: Opteron 185 2.6ghz
Mobo: DFI Expert nForce4
Mem: Corsair TWINX2048-4000PT 200mhz
Video: XFX 7900GT (volt modded) 720/880mhz Core/Mem
HDD: 150GB Raptor and a 500GB HD501LJ Samsung drive
Sound: Creative X-fi ExtremeMusic

Windows 2000:
Average FPS: 39.71
Min FPS: 22.59
Max FPS: 62.38



Windows XP 32bit
Average FPS: 43.88
Min FPS: 24.49
Max FPS: 64.69



Windows XP x64 64bit:
Crysis Bin64 executable;
Average FPS: 40.87
Min FPS: 22.84
Max FPS: 59.02

Crysis Bin32 executable;
Average FPS: 43.42
Min FPS: 26.35
Max FPS: 62.83



Windows Vista 32bit:
Average FPS: 26.96
Min FPS: 15.37
Max FPS: 39.23



Windows Vista 64bit:
Crysis Bin64 executable;
Average FPS: 26.90
Min FPS: 15.51
Max FPS: 38.83

Crysis Bin32 executable;
Average FPS: 26.84
Min FPS: 15.65
Max FPS: 39.05



From this we can conclude that with such a lowend system as mine there is no point at all in running the 64 bit executable of crysis.exe; it seem to have more overhead and thus get lower performance on this system.

We however see that in Vista there is no performance penalty by running 32 or 64 bit.
Having said that Windows XP 32 bit is still 63% faster than Vista both 32 and 64 bit!!!

As for our NT5.X based systems Windows XP 32bit is 10% faster than Windows 2000, and 7% faster than XP x64 when Crysis is running with the 64bit executable.
The performance gap when Crysis is run using the 32bit executable in XP x64 is only 1% tho which is within the error margin.

I would say the winner here is Windows XP x64 because it gives you the choice to run apps in either 32 or 64bit mode, plus you get none of the issues of being able to hit the 2GB virtual address space; which I expect will be doable with Crysis using high settings.
With my medium settings the memory usage was up to 1.4GB for Crysis in Vista, and virtual memory usage peaked at 1.6GB in Vista. That only leaves 400mb until the game will crash due to exceeding the limit for address space. (This is also the reason the game asks you to install KB940105 when you run it in Vista.) There is a 120-day trial you can get from Microsoft incase you want to try XP x64, it's what I used for these tests...

I will of course soon upgrade my graphics card so I can enjoy Crysis (I preordered it about a year ago )
But like many others I am waiting to see how the upcoming G92 8800GTS will stack up to the G92 8800GT. And also what ATI's new 3XXX series of cards will do...
These are very happy times for us PC gamers, both very good games and graphics hardware that will probably challenge the old venerable Geforce TI4200 are literally being released each week!

Edit; I should add that I think the reason my system performs so badly in Vista is because nVidia has been tweaking their drivers for the 88XX range of cards, and leaving out the old series...
I expect performance to be much closer with a more recent graphics card. (But for technical reasons Vista does have a larger overhead so XP should always be a percent or five faster than Vista, this info is from Microsoft themselves and is due to the new driver model introduced in Vista...)

Great insight to complement our tests done in newer generation cards (GeForce 8 series, etc.)

I'm currently running an Athlon X2 4400+ and the GeForce 8800 GTS 320mb loaner I'm running is not doing any good for me. Depending on how things turn out by the end of the year I'm either running a next gen card or SLI two 8800GT cards.