![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Wednesday, August 20, 2008
- Author:
- Matthew Krysiak
- Editor:
- Brent Justice
- Google +1
ASUS ENGTX260 TOP
The falling prices of NVIDIA’s latest video cards have brought the GeForce GTX 260 down to ATI Radeon HD 4870 levels. We have a brand new ASUS GeForce GTX 260 TOP to stack up to the Radeon HD 4870 and see how they perform in Crysis, Age of Conan, and Call of Duty 4.
Crysis
(DirectX 10)
Crysis is a first person shooter that is set in 2019. What makes Crysis unique is the amazing destructible environment and the on the fly customizability of your character and your weapons. Then there is always the graphics quality that will bring even the top end video cards to their knees. We will be playing Crysis in the default APIs for our system, which launches automatically in DX10 mode with the 64-bit executable. We have applied the latest Patch version 1.2.1 for Crysis.
As you progress through Crysis the game becomes more graphically demanding; first the scenic vistas, then the weather effects, and finally the final boss all lead your optimized playable settings of the first few levels to become unplayable. Our run-through in the graphs below involves 5 minutes of gameplay in “Assault_Crysis” the Harbor map. This map includes the transition from night to day, tons of explosions, particles, physics, AI interaction and water.
Note that in the graphs, we have lowered our redline to 25 FPS for Crysis. This game is demanding, and low framerates are impossible to avoid, gameplay is also different in this game to where 25 FPS and up feels very playable which is very likely due to the efficient use of motion blur. Note that the down-spikes to 0 FPS in the graphs are due to the saved game points.
In Crysis, the ASUS ENGTX260 TOP and the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 both shared the same highest playable settings of 1920x1200, no AA, 16X AF, “High” Texture Quality, “High” Shadow Quality, “High” Physics Quality, “High” Shaders Quality, and “High” Water Quality. In fact, they almost had the exact same framerates. The ATI Radeon HD 4870 also used these same in-game settings except for Shadow Quality, which was at “Medium.”
Overall, our gameplay experiences with the three video cards were similar. While you can definitely tell the difference between “High” and “Medium” Shadow Quality if you are looking for it, when you actually play the game it goes unnoticed for the most part. This makes it more of a technical victory for the GTX 260.
Image Quality
Above we can see the difference between “High” and “Medium” Shadow Quality. With the ASUS ENGTX260 TOP and the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 on “High” all the leaves are little more detailed.