Crysis
Once the synthetic benchmarks are out of the way, it’s time to switch to some real world tests to see what these video cards are really capable of. Usually I wait until the last test to take a look at Crysis, but this time I decided to take a look at it first and get it out of the way.
The tests were run on high setting, and the average of three separate tests were taken. In the results that were posted, we see the same pattern evident from the 3DMark testing. The GTX 285 is faster then the GTX 280 by almost 10%, and the GTX 295 trumps all participants.
Since the results were favourable to my doing so, I decided to crank up the settings as high as I could and see how playable the game remained and how realistic it turned out. Let’s just say that doing that showed me what gaming can be all about. I was able to fully experience the lush jungle environments the game takes place in, and use it to my advantage. It’s almost too bad that the FPS genre is mostly made up of fast paced games, because sometimes I would find the scenery passing by too fast to be really appreciated. Still the speed of Crysis is nothing compared to our next test.
Unreal Tournament 3
Unreal Tournament made its name on fast paced, sports-like, FPS competition. This fast paced game has always been about ramping up the competitive spirit of its players, but in this latest version, the guys at Epic decided to ramp up the graphical quality of the experience. The is still quite playable though, as our results show.
The GTX 285 once again comes in at an expected performance increase over it’s predecessor. However the GTX 295 posts a rather curious number, rather then blowing the competition out of the water. At both resolutions, the GTX 295 only made performance gains of less then 5% over the single GPU GTX 285.
Even the confusion with the results still can’t cloud the one fact behind this test, and it’s that the gameplay in UT3 with either of these cards is butter-smooth. Unlike Crysis, the framerates in UT3 show that you have nothing to worry about if you want to crank the settings as far as they can go.