Crysis 3

Still one of our most punishing benchmarks, Crysis 3 needs no introduction. With Crysis 3, Crytek has gone back to trying to kill computers and still holds “most punishing shooter” title in our benchmark suite. Only in a handful of setups can we even run Crysis 3 at its highest (Very High) settings, and that’s still without AA. Crysis 1 was an excellent template for the kind of performance required to drive games for the next few years, and Crysis 3 looks to be much the same for 2015.

Crysis 3 - 3840x2160 - High Quality + FXAA

Crysis 3 - 3840x2160 - Low Quality + FXAA

Crysis 3 - 2560x1440 - High Quality + FXAA

With GTX Titan X being based on the same iteration of the Maxwell architecture as the GTX 980 and its GM200 GPU essentially built as a GM204 + 50%, it comes as no surprise that the performance gains over GTX 980 are going to be rather consistent. In Crysis 3 the GTX Titan X holds a 35% performance lead at 4K, with that lead tapering slightly to 30% at 2560. Meanwhile the lead over the GK110 cards isn’t quite what we saw with BF4, dropping to around 45% and 55% for GTX 780 Ti and GTX Titan respectively.

As one of our most punishing games, this is also a good example of where even GTX Titan X will come up short at 4K. Even without MSAA and one step below Crysis 3’s Very High quality settings, the GTX Titan X can only muster 42fps. If you want to get to 60fps you will need to drop to Low quality, or drop the resolution to 1440p. The latter will get you 85.2fps at the same quality settings, which again highlights GTX Titan X’s second strength as a good card for driving high refresh rate 1440p displays.

Meanwhile this is another game where our multi-GPU cards still pull ahead, reminding us of the spoiler potential for the R9 295X2 and the GTX 980 SLI. In fact AMD gets some very good scaling here, and they need it as the GTX Titan X bests the R9 290XU by 56% at 4K High.

Battlefield 4 Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor
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  • cmoney408 - Tuesday, March 24, 2015 - link

    can you please post the settings you used for the 295x2? not the in game settings, but what you used in catalyst.
  • FlushedBubblyJock - Thursday, April 2, 2015 - link

    " and the Radeon R9 295X2, the latter of which is down to ~$699 these days and "

    I knew it wouldn't be $699 when i clicked the link...

    its frikkin $838 , $ 1,176 $990, $978 ...

    Yep, that's the real amd card price, not the fantasy one.
  • gianluca - Sunday, April 5, 2015 - link

    Hi!
    Just a question: Do you suggest me to buy r9 295x2?
    Thx
  • Kyururin - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link

    Umm I find it pointless to compare AMD R9 290x with GTX 980, R9 290x is build to be competitive to Nvidia's stock 780 not 780ti and sure as hell not GTX 980, it's dumb, it's like trying to ask a grandma(R9 290x) to compete with supermodel(GTX 980) in a beauty pageant, of course Nvidia is going to win, but it's not like the winning gap is spectacular or something to be astonished about. Last but not least GTX 980's lead over the grandma is the largest sub 2k, let's not forget that both the GTX 980 and the grandma are build to handle 4k so given the time Nvidia has to prepare the GTX980, it should had obliterated the grandma in 4k but the performance gap is not that fricking big and deserved to be woved, especially FarCry 4. Fanboys always bash AMD for their terrible drivers but it's not like they are ignored you dumb witt, they are slowly improving their drivers. Did AMD ever said We are going to pretend that our driver don't suck and so we are not going to fix it.
  • alexreffand - Monday, May 18, 2015 - link

    Why is the GTX 580 in the tests? Why not the Titan Z or even the 970?
  • ajboysen - Monday, July 25, 2016 - link

    I'm not sure if the specs have changed since this post but they list the boost clock speed as 1531 MHz, Not 1002

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