Crysis 2 – DX9 vs DX11 – 6990 vs GTX590

 

Conclusion

Crysis 2 – how the masses were overjoyed when it was released that pretty much every graphics card could play it at high if not maxed out settings. “Crytek finally coded it properly” is all we kept hearing. True, but you are missing the point.

Crysis 1 for whatever reason was so demanding it was a milestone in gaming history. Still to this day its one of the most demanding games on the planet. This fact alone is what made graphics card designers and manufacturers wake up in the middle of the night in cold sweats worried about how they were going to produce products to tame the beast. I’d put money on the fact if it wasn’t for that game we never would have seen the GTX295.

So in short its games like these that help the industry to progress quicker. Now maybe you will understand that when Crysis 2 in DX9 was first released as a blatant console port those of us with the ability to view the bigger picture were left somewhat deflated and that’s putting it politely. Then the floods of rumours about there being a DX11 and High Resolution Texture Pack specifically designed for enthusiast gamers. Many of us were not holding our breath that it would ever see the light of day.

Yet again let’s take a step back and view this from a different perspective because Crytek, EA and Nvidia have been very clever and have done something that even your local drug dealer would understand. Crysis 2 gets released in DX9, everything is playing it pretty much maxed out. Even little Jimmy playing on his dual core AMD with a 4850 graphics card is happily playing it nigh on maxed out. A few months later the DX11 and high res texture pack becomes available so everyone installs it. Suddenly little Jimmy’s PC will no longer run the game maxed out, to be frank its hardly playing it at all now. Little Jimmy now goes into Crysis 2 withdrawal because he doesn’t want to have to turn his settings down because he is too used to it playing maxed out. The only way for little Jimmy to feed his Crysis 2 addiction is to buy a new graphics card in the hope of getting his FPS back.

There it is. Was there really a delay to get DX11 fixed, or was it purely a very clever marketing strategy? Maybe we’ll never know but if it is the latter then they all deserve a medal for seeing it through.

The basis of this review was to test the difference before and after the new patches on the two fastest graphics cards on the planet. Unsurprisingly the Nvidia was much better in every aspect, both minimum and average FPS were significantly in front of the AMD. On average we were seeing 40FPS drops from the DX9 game to the maxed out DX11 game, a fair drop for these dual core cards with buckets of VRAM on board. But seeing as the game was near on coded for the Nvidia architecture its not that surprising. In all our future reviews will be moving onto using Crysis 2 maxed out as a part of our normal testing procedure, only time will tell what cards will pass the tests.

Thanks to Powercolor and Zotac for the cards on test today, you can discuss your thoughts in our forums.