Crysis 2 – DX9 vs DX11 – 6990 vs GTX590

Introduction

When Crysis 2 first appeared we were all a bit disappointed in the graphical splendour on offer. Crytek had, with the original Crysis, given us a taste of the future and brought plentiful eye-candy.

Crysis 2 though was held back significantly on PCs by its console roots. As the current raft of gaming consoles are now ageing somewhat the original engine only took advantage of the DirectX 9 featureset. Now though we have the v1.9 patch for Crysis 2 which enables DirectX 11 features and so it finally looks like a cutting edge PC Game.

So what’s new?

– Tessellation + Displacement Mapping
– High Quality HDR Motion Blur
– Realistic Shadows with Variable Penumbra
– Sprite Based Bokeh Depth of Field
– Parallax Occlusion Mapping
– Particles Motion Blur, Shadows and Art Updates
– Water Rendering improvements and using Tessellation + Displacement Mapping

As you can see there is a raft of improvements all designed to make the whole thing far more realistic with Tessellation enabling far greater detail and the adjustments to shadows and depth of field helping to put you in the game.

Obviously a High-Res texture pack and DirectX 11 features really up the ante as far as recommended specs go. Crytek now recommend a 1.5GB DX11 GPU, Quad Core CPU, 8GB of RAM and SSD. Quite a step up from the standard specifications but this is a huge step up in quality.

Let’s grab a look at some screens. Starting with DirectX 9…