Performance - GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB

As per our original article, we'll be testing Crysis' performance at both 1280x1024 and 1600x1200, with and without 4x anti-aliasing enabled, and utilising both NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB and GeForce 8800 GT 512MB parts for our benchmarking.  Our main point of comparison here is with regard to performance using NVIDIA's ForceWare 169.04 and 169.09 drivers, with the Crysis executable named as both 'Crysis.exe' and 'Driverbug.exe', to sniff out any changes in performance between these two driver revisions now that the water reflection rendering issue has been fixed.  The GeForce 8800 GTS is first up, starting out at 1280x1024.

At this resolution, renaming the executable in ForceWare 169.04 gave us close to a 7% drop in performance.  Utilising ForceWare 169.09, there is no longer any performance drop from renaming the Crysis executable, but performance overall is around 7% lower than that seen in the previous driver set, putting it on a par with the older driver with the game EXE renamed.  This is still faster than the older ForceWare 163.69 WHQL driver, but suggests that much of the additional performance seen in ForceWare 169.01 through to 169.04 was due to that water reflection rendering issue.

With 4x anti-aliasing enabled, we see similar results - Renaming the executable no longer harms performance in ForceWare 169.09, but overall performance is equal to that under ForceWare 169.04 with the executable renamed to remove the water reflection bug.  This leaves performance over 7% lower, but with image quality restored to its full glory in-game.

Out findings continue in the same vein at 1600x1200 - Once again, performance is around 7% lower using ForceWare 169.09, on a par with ForceWare 169.04 after the executable is renamed to remove the water reflection bug.

Finally, our highest test settings with this particular board show a smaller performance deficit, but our ForceWare 169.09 results still closely match those of ForceWare 169.04 with the executable renamed.