Current location:	Home, about to hit the shower
Current mood:	pleased
Current music:	CTV Canada AM
Entry tags:	computers, games, reviews, the dark knight pc

Into the Valley of Death rode the i7
Well, I guess I had to at some point or another. I downloaded and installed the Crysis demo yesterday evening just to see how this system would handle it.

As it turns out, rather well. I used the demo's auto detection and it suggested that everything be set to "high"... though it defaulted to 1024x768 instead of 1280x1024 resolution. I bumped up the resolution to the latter and turned of Anti-Aliasing, then gave it a shot.

Mechanically it was excellent; though there was no built-in frame counter I didn't encounter any slow-downs or stuttering. There was an awful v-synch artifact (horizontal lines scrolling down the screen) that I couldn't address in the settings (poor form, Crytek; poor form indeed) but it disappeared when I switched from full-screen to windowed view. Odd. In any case, though, to my eye it appeared to support a framerate higher than 30fps even in the tight-and-crazy action. (I did try it with anti-aliasing and did find some stutter in cutscenes, though.)

Case temperature remained under my scare value, with the CPU reaching 50°C, the mo-bo 49°, and the system hotspot (the southbridge) staying below 72°. And that's with a game notorious as a system crusher... so I guess I shouldn't worry so much about heat build-up.

As far as gameplay goes... well, I didn't like the earlier Far Cry very much and Crysis is basically the same game in a prettier wrapper. It's competant as a shooter and the "open world" approach does grant the illusion of freedom, but the AI seems woefully artificial to me (though I'll grant its intelligence) and I found the story pedestrian; the combat is involving, but it's just an exercise in sneeking and use of iron- (or reflex-) sights. I won't be buying the retail version any time soon.

-- Steve did find it very pretty, though, and it actted as an excellent "proving ground" for "Dark Knight".