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 2013.

Crysis 3 is another strong title for NVIDIA, leading to GTX 780 Ti easily taking the top spot at 2560 for single-GPU setups. At 62.4fps it’s the first and only card fast enough to deliver better than 60fps despite Crysis 3’s punishing rendering workload, and in the process outperforms the 290X by about 20%. Even 7990, the closest thing to single-card competition for the GTX 780 Ti, is still only less than 2fps ahead.

Meanwhile throwing on another GTX 780 Ti will further improve performance here, though with shaky results for NVIDIA. At 2560 this is enough to crack 100fps, but at a 4K NVIDIA’s SLI scaling starts coming up short. The difference in scaling becomes so great that the 290X closes the gap and then some, leading to the 290X CF taking the lead. Given the fact that the GTX 780 Ti SLI is largely overkill for anything but these high resolutions, this weaker scaling undercuts the practicality of going with a GTX 780’s Ti SLI in these situations.

Battlefield 3 Crysis: Warhead
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  • 1Angelreloaded - Saturday, November 16, 2013 - link

    False I Hit the 3.5 Gb limit quite a few times due to it being a 32 bit game, now if they are 64bit games then yes they will use more than 3GB for textures and draw distance , but meh you know what your talking about.......right.
  • ahlan - Friday, November 8, 2013 - link

    Damage control Nvidia fanboy! Nvidia fanboys are delusional as MS and Apple fanboys...

    Keep paying more for the same performance...
  • dylan522p - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link

    Not at all. In quiet more. It runs hotter, is louder 95% of the time and is using more power.
  • dylan522p - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link

    And performs significantly worse.
  • DMCalloway - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link

    Definition of upsetting: Early gtx 780 adopters now able to purchase a 'true' gtx 780 at the same price point previous gtx 780's were at launch. Nvidia sat back, took everyone's cash, and now to remain competitive finally release a fully enabled chip..... wow
  • Spunjji - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link

    I think early adopters on both sides got dicked here. The R9 290 makes everything else look like a joke in terms of pricing, for all its manifest flaws.
  • dylan522p - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link

    I would rather not have the 480v2, in my machine.
  • Yojimbo - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link

    And next year they'll release something even faster at the same price point. You can't have both increasing performance/price over time and also not have your new hardware become a comparatively bad deal in the future. People who bought the GTX 780 when it came out got 5 to 6 months of use of the card in exchange for a card which is now ~15% slower than what's available at the same price point.
  • ShieTar - Friday, November 8, 2013 - link

    In other words: Nvidia did what absolutely every other CPU & GPU provider has also done over the last 30 years? Wow indeed.

    Everybody wants to bring the most profitable product possible to the market. That means, you need to be good enough to interest customers and cheap enough to be affordable. And you don't get better or cheaper, unless something changes the market, e.g. competition.
  • extide - Thursday, November 7, 2013 - link

    You stated the 290x is "unable to compete with an older architecture." That is false. LOL

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