HD4870 512MB - MSI R4870 and R4870 OC review

Page 5 - Performance: Crysis

This is the long awaited Crytek release, sort of a heir of FarCry, which 3 years ago was dazzling with its graphics, making gamers with the top-notch video cards (GeForce 5900 / Radeon 9800 at that time) murmur about being unable to play at highest settings like they were used to. Their high-end systems just being unable to cope with the heavy engine.

In other words - Crysis was one of the MOST expected game of 2007. In game you assume the role of future Spec-ops soldier, equipped with the so called “Crysis Suit” - a suit giving you special skills and powers. Henceforth we'll be talking about graphics and scenery so real as if pulled out of a Hollywood blockbuster. The vast and incredibly detailed levels require a large amount of memory, so if you fancy enjoying some of the more special DX10 effects and higher resolution, high class video card, processor an lots of RAM are a must. And they were... almost enough.

In order to test the card performance within the game we used the Crysis benchmark tool from HOCBench, which not surprisingly offers some advantages. For starters this tool has the option to NOT use the integrated in Crysis demo, since we all know that AMD and NVIDIA had used some tricks (optimizing their drivers precisely for it). Thus gaining as much as 50% better "game" performance. "Game" as in the time demo, not in the actual gameplay. Shameful really

At last! Affordable hardware capable of running Crysis decently at higher resolutions :) Indeed MSI R4870 and R4870 OC perfor very similarly to 260GTX, that is in the same price range.