Crysis

Crysis is a science fiction first person shooter developed by Crytek, the creators of Farcry. It uses their latest game engine, CryENGINE2 which is the successor to CryENGINE, the engine used on Farcry. Some of the graphical features it has are as follows:

• Volumetric 3D Clouds
  
• Real time Ambient Maps with dynamic lighting and no premade shadows
  
• screen Space Ambient Occlusion
  
• 3D Ocean Technology dynamically modifies the ocean surface based on wind and wave direction and creates moving shadow sand highlights underwater
  
• Depth of field to focus on certain objects while blurring out the edges and far away places
  
• Vector Motion blur on both camera movement and individual objects
  
• Dynamic Soft shadows with objects casting realistic shadows in real time
  
• Realistic Facial Animation that can be captured from an actor's face
  
• Subsurface scattering
  
• Breakable Buildings allowing more tactical preplanning on the player's side
  
• Breakable Vegetation (with possibly heavy foliage) enabling players and enemy AI to level entire forests as a tactical maneuver or
• other purposes
  
• Advanced Rope Physics showcasing bendable vegetation responding to wind, rain or character movement and realistically interactive rope bridges
  
• Component Vehicle Damage giving vehicles different destroyable parts, such as tires on jeeps or helicopter blades
  
• HDR lighting
  
• Fully interactive and destructible environments
  
• Advanced particle system with fire or rain being affected by forces such as wind
  
• Time of Day Lighting, with sunrise, and sunset effects ensuring realistic transition between daytime and nighttime
  
• Lightbeams and Shafts when light intersects with solid or highly detailed geometry, and can generate "Godray" effects underwater
  
• Parallax Occlusion Mapping giving a greater sense of depth to a surface texture, realistically emphasizing the relief surface structure of objects
  
• Long Range View Distance of up to 16km from ingame measurements
  
• Parametric Skeletal Animation System
  
• Procedural Motion Warping
  

NB. List taken from Wikipedia

As well as supporting shader model 2.0, 3.0 and 4.0, the engine is also multi-threaded and takes advantage of hyper-threading and multi-core systems.

Props to the crymod team for putting this demo together.

Low Setting

Interestingly, the 8800GT wipes the floor with the GTS on lower details with no AA. However, add AA into the mix, and the GTS crawls while the GT continues rendering above 30FPS.

NB. The GTS had some strange artifacting issues at 1600*1200 with 16xQAA which is the main reason for its horrendous performance at these settings.

High Setting

The GTS fairs a little better against the GT at higher resolutions, holding it's own...sort of. However, as soon as you add anti aliasing the GTS dies a horrible death, while the GT continues running strong.

Cost

The cheapest I found the XFX 8800GT Alpha Dog XXX for was £205. This is a full £100-£150 cheaper than a GTX and up to £250 cheaper than some Ultras are still selling for. 8800GTS are still going for around £180-£200 for the 320mb versions, and for the 640mb rendition there is around a £245 price tag.

Noise and Cooling

Noise wise, the 8800GT is almost whisper quiet at idle which is really nice to see from such a high end card. Unfortunately, the fan still spins up a fair way during load and that means it gets louder too. It's quieter than other top-end 8 series cards are when under full load, but it's not a quiet cooling solution; and definitely not mulnaz.

In terms of temperature, idle sees the 8800 in the mid 50s, but once you start loading, it rises quite sharply and tends to sit in the mid 80s until the load decreases.

NB. All temperatures mentioned are in degrees Celsius.