Crysis demo performance in-depth

Tested the new 169.09 drivers this week, performance was unchanged in XP 32bit, XP x64, and Vista 32bit

Did not test Win2K or Vista x64

Got a new computer now, old one decided to give up...

CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4Ghz
Mobo: Asus Maximus Formula
Mem: 8GB OCZ OCZ2N800SR4GK
Video: Asus Geforce 8800GTS 512MB
HDD: 150GB Raptor and a 500GB HD501LJ Samsung drive
Sound: Auzentech X-Meridian

Graphics card drivers this time around are 169.21 for XP x64 and 169.25 for Vista x64
Intel Chipset drivers v8.3.1.1009
The Creative X-fi was swapped out due to being a crap soundcard with crap drivers In it's place I'm using a Auzentech X-Meridian with drivers dated 9/3/2007

Resolution this time is 1600x1200, and all settings are on high


Windows XP x64 64bit:
Crysis Bin64 executable;
Average FPS: 32.82
Min FPS: 12.66
Max FPS: 38.55

Crysis Bin32 executable;
Average FPS: 32.86
Min FPS: 11.92
Max FPS: 38.12


Windows Vista 64bit:
Crysis Bin64 executable;
Average FPS: 28.31
Min FPS: 13.6
Max FPS: 31.41

Crysis Bin32 executable;
Average FPS: 28.42
Min FPS: 11.93
Max FPS: 31.10

This time around there is no difference at all to running the Crysis 32 or 64bit EXE in both Vista and XP...
However, Windows XP x64 is still 16% faster than Vista x64.
That's all for now
Take note that all hardware and software is different from the test above by me so they are not at all comparable... What we can conclude tho is that neither Creative nor nVidia can write proper drivers, Creative manages the feat to make their 64bit driver incompatible with more than 2GB RAM, and in Nvidias case their previous range of card manages a staggering 63% performance difference in XP vs Vista!

Perhaps I missed something. But Vista is going to run that game with DX10, XP64 will use DX9. I imagine that is going to cause a performance hit.

Thanks for the tip SNGX!

Redid the tests in Vista x64 while forcing the game into DirectX9 mode (just add -DX9 to the start command)

Results;
Windows Vista 64bit:
Crysis Bin32 executable;
DirectX9 Renderpath
Average FPS: 31.67
Min FPS: 15.75
Max FPS: 37.78

Now XP is only 3.76% faster than Vista, this performance I admit is better than I ever expected Vista to reach!
It also begs the question of what would happen if we ran our 7900GT in a DirectX9 codepath in Vista aswell, might that be the only reason it is 63% faster in XP vs Vista?

Answering my question in my previous post; the performance is unchanged, a card which does not support DX10 is always run in a DX9 codepath it seems, the -DX9 setting has no effect at all on performance.

So that is to say that if you have a 7900GT and you play Crysis in Vista instead of XP you are loosing out on allot of performance (XP is 63% faster than Vista on the 7900GT)

However the 512MB 8800GTS seems to have had it's drivers much better tweaked so here the difference is below 4% if you run the DX9 codepath and 16% if you run the DX10 codepath. This seems very reasonable to me... (the 8800GTS part that is)

As for the miserable performance of the cards before the 8800 series, well, what can you say really. if you are gaming there really is no reason at all for you to do so in Vista atleast!

Average FPS: 26.31
Min FPS: 17.38
Max FPS: 37.62

You can compare these numbers with the first one I ran. The rig is now the Intel Q6600 instead, with 8GB RAM...
As you can see they are virtually identical, showing that the 4 core Q6600 does not help at all since we are so limited by our graphics card anyway, even at such a low resolution...

Here are some tests with my new computer running Windows 2000 Advanced Server
Windows 2000 does licensing differently to XP; it does not differniate between two physical CPU's and two CPU's on a single CPU package, i.e. dual core. Therefore Win2K Professional only supports 2 cores, Server 4 Cores and Advanced Server 8 cores.
So why Advanced server and not just server you ask? it's because Advanced server supports up to 8GB of RAM with Physical Address Extensions. I however found out that both my Auzentech X-Meridian and Creative X-Fi don't have compatible drivers for PAE so I had to limit my RAM to what any other normal 32-bit OS gets, ca 3.4GB in this case...
Without the soundcard drivers installed I was able to use all 8GB with no issues at all, take note tho that in a 32bit OS a single process can only allocate a max of 2GB RAM anyway unless it is coded to support Address Windowing Extensions but that is soley for enterprise server applications...

Now for the performance, thing is since I was testing the soundcards I found out that they don't affect the performance at all, both the Auzentech X-Meridian and Creative X-fi gets exactly the same performance in Crysis as with running with no soundcard at all... (Which makes me all the more happy about having ditched my X-fi for my regular usage)

Windows 2000 Advanced Server:
Average FPS: 33.24
Min FPS: 11.91
Max FPS: 39.41

So there you have it, Windows 2000 Advanced Server is 1.16% faster than Windows XP x64 on my new computer