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 the “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

Under Crysis 3 the R9 Fury once again has the lead, though there is a clear amount of variation in that lead depending on the resolution. At 4K it’s 14% or so, but at 1440p it’s just 5%. This is consistent with the general trend for AMD and NVIDIA cards, which is that AMD sees better performance scaling at higher resolutions, and is a big part of the reason why AMD is pushing 4K for the R9 Fury X and R9 Fury. Still, based on absolute performance, the R9 Fury’s performance probably makes it better suited for 1440p.

Meanwhile the R9 Fury cards once again consistently trail the R9 Fury X by no more than 7%. Crysis 3 is generally more sensitive to changes in shader throughput, so it’s interesting to see that the performance gap is as narrow as it is here. These kinds of results imply that the R9 Fury X’s last 512 stream processors aren’t being put to very good use, since most of the performance difference can be accounted for in the clockspeed difference.

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  • nightbringer57 - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link

    Intel kept it in stock for a while but it didn't sell. So the management decided to get rid of it, gave it away to a few colleagues (dell, HP, many OEMs used BTX for quite a while, both because it was a good user lock-down solution and because the inconvenients of BTX didn't matter in OEM computers, while the advantages were still here) and noone ever heard of it on the retail market again?
  • nightbringer57 - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link

    Damn those not-editable comments...
    I forgot to add: with the switch from the netburst.prescott architecture to Conroe (and its followers), CPU cooling became much less of a hassle for mainstream models so Intel did not have anything left to gain from the effort put into BTX.
  • xenol - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link

    It survived in OEMs. I remember cracking open Dell computers in the later half of 2000 and finding out they were BTX.
  • yuhong - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link

    I wonder if a BTX2 standard that fixes the problems of original BTX is a good idea.
  • onewingedangel - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link

    With the introduction of HBM, perhaps it's time to move to socketed GPUs.

    It seems ridiculous for the industry standard spec to devote so much space to the comparatively low-power CPU whilst the high-power GPU has to fit within the confines of (multiple) pci-e expansion slots.

    Is it not time to move beyond the confines of ATX?
  • DanNeely - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link

    Even with the smaller PCB footprint allowed by HBM; filling up the area currently taken by expansion cards would only give you room for a single GPU + support components in an mATX sized board (most of the space between the PCIe slots and edge of the mobo is used for other stuff that would need to be kept not replaced with GPU bits); and the tower cooler on top of it would be a major obstruction for any non-GPU PCIe cards you might want to put into the system.
  • soccerballtux - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link

    man, the convenience of the socketed GPU is great, but just think of how much power we could have if it had it's own dedicated card!
  • meacupla - Friday, July 10, 2015 - link

    The clever design trend, or at least what I think is clever, is where the GPU+CPU heatsinks are connected together, so that, instead of many smaller heatsinks trying to cool one chip each, you can have one giant heatsink doing all the work, which can result in less space, as opposed to volume, being occupied by the heatsink.

    You can see this sort of design on high end gaming laptops, Mac Pro, and custom water cooling builds. The only catch is, they're all expensive. Laptops and Mac Pro are, pretty much, completely proprietary, while custom water cooling requires time and effort.

    If all ATX mobos and GPUs had their core and heatsink mounting holes in the exact same spot, it would be much easier to design a 'universal multi-core heatsink' that you could just attach to everything that needs it.
  • Peichen - Saturday, July 11, 2015 - link

    That's quite a good idea. With heat-pipes, distance doesn't really matter so if there is a CPU heatsink that can extend 4x 8mm/10mm heatpipes over the videocard to cooled the GPU, it would be far quieter than the 3x 90mm can cooler on videocard now.
  • FlushedBubblyJock - Wednesday, July 15, 2015 - link

    330 watts transferred to the low lying motherboard, with PINS attached to amd's core failure next...
    Slap that monster heat onto the motherboard, then you can have a giant green plastic enclosure like Dell towers to try to move that heat outside the case... oh, plus a whole 'nother giant VRM setup on the motherboard... yeah they sure will be doing that soon ... just lay down that extra 50 bucks on every motherboard with some 6X VRM's just incase amd fanboy decides he wants to buy the megawatter amd rebranded chip...

    Yep, NOT HAPPENING !

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