Grail Quest: Crysis/Max Settings/1080p60

The gauntlet has been thrown down. According to our contact at nVidia, the new GTX295 dual GPU graphics card is the most powerful piece of consumer-level rendering hardware in the world, and the first to play Crysis at Very High settings at 1080p60. In DirectX 9, any way. You’ll need two of these £400 graphics cards to get similar performance in DX10. So the theory goes any way.

Well, Eurogamer were keen to run the feature on gaming technology reaching this new standard, but nVidia and its partners were unable to supply a card (edit: shortages in review samples, I’ve now been informed.) So… I bought one of my own. I mean, we’re talking about a technological leap waaaaaaay ahead of the current consoles. Indeed, we’re looking at GPU power probably in excess of what we’ll see next gen too. We really had no choice, this is a gaming milestone.

More than that, it’s an actual event - the standard bearer for graphical power being run at maximum settings on a 1080p display. This would prove, beyond all doubt, that the PC should take pride of place in the collection of gaming hardware connected to your HDTV. So those are the somewhat massive expectations, but what kind of surrounding system do you need to get maximum performance, and does the GTX295 live up to the hype? Well, based on our preliminary findings, the jury’s still out on this one. Indeed, they’ve only just started their deliberations, and they’re not particularly happy at the moment.

But one thing’s for sure: in the Digital Foundry analysis, there’ll be no synthetic benchmarks, no use of FRAPS. V-lock and triple-buffering will be FULLY engaged because if you’re spending £400 on a GPU, screen tear is the technological equivalent of being poked in the eye with a shitty stick.

We'll be benching the game via TrueHD captures - producing physical analyses of what’s actually coming out of the HDMI port of the GTX295. In short, real life benchmarks, brought to life as only we can. More soon!