Well, I’m back and blogging! Life seems to have a terrible habit of interfering with my online life, but a lot has been happening as of late. However, that is no excuse, and the blogging shall commence posthaste!
Well, as many in the gaming community have noted, the new PC game, Crysis, by developer Crytek, has received awards galore for best graphics, physics, and general eye candy. Unfortunately, the game is a destroyer of GPU’s, the slayer of physics cards, obliterator of of RAM, and the annihilator of any CPU you foolishly throw in it’s path.
Now, I do not have the greatest gaming PC of all time. After working this summer at the local Nippon Institute of Technology, I thought I’d splurge a bit on a new PC for my everyday needs, gaming included. Seeing as my budget was limited by the impeding purchase of a car, I settled on a Dell XPS 410 (A.K.A. Dell Dimension 9200). It had a Core 2 Quad 2.4GHz, which is it’s best feature. 2 GB’s of RAM, I put in some speedy hard drives, Nvidea 8600, Vista Ultimate, nothing to spectacular, but still reasonable for gaming. It plays Command and Conquer 3 great with all settings maxed, Bioshock, Orange Box, everything looks nice on the Dell 24″ monitor that I use with it.
After I heard on Diggnation that Kevin had to buy a bloody Falcon Northwest insane machine to even get acceptable frame rates, I knew I had to see what it would do on an average persons PC.
I got the game, installed it, which went nice and fast, and booted it up. A little sluggish in opening, but nothing to worry about. I immediately went into options before anything else and ran its auto detect to recommends video settings. It chose medium for my system. I then launched the single player campaign, and waited through its monotonous loading. My first impression when the game launched was this:
Oh! That looks pretty! Oh…, wait…. it’s not moving. At all. Damn.
I check the FPS, and I was getting numbers ranging from 1-5. I went back into options, but now the whole app was lagging to such an extent that i had to hold buttons for upwards of 5 seconds before the system would act on them. Finally, after far to much tweaking, I hat framerates in the 20-30 range; still bad, but the best I could really get without being in a polygon jungle. The resolution was such that I couldn’t aim at all, every movement caused the FPS to drop, looking around made my curser teleport to various places on the map, and it was generally a failure. It devoured my 2 gigs of RAM, my Core 2 quad was plugging away at 75%, and the graphics card sounded like it was going to take off out of my PC.
So, my verdict is this. If you like First Person Shooters, but also enjoy having money to spend on things other that PC components, avoid Crysis. If you have a PC with some SLI’d 8800’s, an insane processor, and more memory that you have hard disk space, you might be able to squeeze out some acceptable frame rates.
