 But can it run Crysis? The age-old question from the glory days of gaming and computers when we all still used optical drive, Windows Vista was still a thing and 4K was just a glimmer in some developers' eye. Since the glory days were a full eight years ago, we decided that it was time to ask that question again, but with modern hardware and see if we've gotten any closer to being able to run Crysis without having to use a military supercomputer or something. Give the video a like if you're interested in seeing another video on the Steam Controller. Intel brings DDR4 to the mainstream with their new Core i7-6700K and Core i5-6600K processors. Check out the link in the video description to learn more. So the goal here was to check out how well modern product stacks from both AMD and from Nvidia could run a completely notoriously demanding title from yesteryear, namely The Witcher 2 Assassin of the Kings from 2011 and the aforementioned Crysis 1 from 2007. We ran both games at 1080p with the settings completely maxed out, including enabling uber sampling on The Witcher 2, which is an extremely hard to run anti-aliasing setting that was infamous for causing huge performance hits on GPUs at the time. Our AMD GPU stack included the top-end R9 Nano and ASUS Strix Radeon 390X, a Gigabyte WindForce R9 290, a Sapphire R9 285 Compact, an MSI Gaming R9 270, and finally a reference R7 260X. On the Nvidia side, we used a reference GeForce GTX 980 Ti, a Gigabyte G1 Gaming GTX 980, an Amp Omega Edition GTX 970 from Zotac, an ASUS Strix GTX 960, and a GTX 950 with a reference GTX 750 Ti for comparison as well. We threw in a couple older cards too, like a GeForce GTX 480 as well as an 8800 GT, which was released around the same time as these games were. For both brands, we used the latest drivers as of mid-October 2015. All of our testing took place on our standard test bench consisting of an Intel Core i7 5930K processor an ASUS X99 Deluxe motherboard, 16GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR4 RAM, a Samsung 850 Pro 1TB SSD, a Corsair H100i GTX All-in-One Cooler, and a Corsair AX1200i Fully Modular Power Supply. Quite a far cry from your average high-end rig from back when Crysis was released and people were unboxing their shiny new Q6600s. With all that said, let's get right to the results. People who utilized the answer to, but can it run Crysis as the definitive measuring stick for any gaming rig back in the late 2000s would probably be pleasantly surprised at how much GPUs have evolved since then. All but one of our modern cards achieved playable frame rates at 1080p with everything maxed out, with higher-end cards starting at the GTX 970 and the R9 290 getting frame rates between the mid 70s and low 90s. Not too surprising when you consider that, for example, the 980 Ti has more than four times the number of Cuda cores as one of the most popular top-end cards back when Crysis came out, the GeForce 8800 Ultra. The only modern card that came up short was our 750 Ti, which only mustered 8 frames per second. Not so great. And therefore, cannot really run Crysis. But while these numbers are fine if you have a 1080p 60Hz monitor, they might leave you feeling a little disappointed if you wanted to run Crysis at higher resolutions or frame rates than you did back in the mid 2000s. But when you consider the fact that frame rates in the 80 to 90 range are what you'll get on a number of much more recent titles on modern hardware, you can have expected Crysis to run far better than it did for us. Additionally, we noticed some very prominent screen tearing on a lot of our cards, basically all of them. So while our modern tech stack from GPUs passed the but cannot run Crysis test, it wasn't really with flying colors. Moving on to The Witcher 2, we experienced slightly lower numbers as the game is only about four years old as opposed to eight, but still playable frame rates. And for the most part, that's what we got. With everything maxed out and uber sampling enabled, we saw a range from 27 frames per second on a GTX 950 and the R9 270 to 65 FPS on the GTX 980 Ti. The only cards that didn't achieve playable frame rates were the R7 260X and, again, the GTX 750 Ti. Interestingly, we saw some pretty significant differences between AMD and Nvidia cards during our Witcher 2 benchmarks. Although Team Red and Team Green were a lot closer on our Crysis test, Nvidia ran away from AMD and The Witcher 2 with even the top-end R9 Nano and R9 390X trailing the GTX 970 by a full nine FPS and falling even further behind when compared to the top of the Nvidia stack cards. We suspected this was due to AMD cards reacting weirdly with uber sampling, so we tested without uber sampling running and saw the FPS jump to 101 on the Nano, but it still lagged behind the GTX 970, which put out 117 FPS. We dug a little bit further and we found that the Nano was throttling its GPU usage quite a bit, which might also explain the strange results we got in The Witcher 2 when we tested it on another AMD card, the Radeon 7970, back in 2012. You can check out the results of that video up here. But regardless of which team's card you have in your rig, I wouldn't expect buttery smooth gameplay at higher than 1080p resolutions if you crank everything up. This game's pretty intense to run. But even though the numbers might be slightly underwhelming, considering how long both of these games have been on the market, we've still obviously made a lot of progress in terms of how much your dollar will get you. Our GTX 480, a top-end card back in 2010, only put out 40 FPS in Crysis and 24 FPS in Witcher 2 with uber sampling, which was beaten by the $170 R9 270 and a GTX 950. And just in case you've forgotten how difficult it was to run Crysis, our super old-school 8800 GT crashed out of Crysis, but was able to get 6 FPS in Witcher 2. So what's our conclusion other than this was pretty fun? It's pretty clear that there's been a big improvement over the past few years of what you can do with even just a mid-range GPU, but games that are legendarily difficult to run will still live up to that reputation to a certain extent. Obviously, you're still going to be in a great position to enjoy older titles if you have a decent modern card under the hood, but if you ask your system, can you run Crysis at 4K, you might not get that fantastic of an answer unless you're packing a lot of heat. Squarespace, build it beautiful. 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If this video sucked, you know what to do, but if it was awesome, run Crysis on your system, get subscribed, hit the like button, or even consider supporting us directly by using our affiliate code to shop on Amazon, buy a cool t-shirt that isn't from Twitch or that is from Twitch, I don't know, or with a direct monthly contribution through the forum. Now that you're done doing that kind of stuff, you're probably wondering what to watch next, so click the little button in the top right-hand corner to check out this video, where I look at the surprisingly good but also super stripped down on HubRouter from Google and TP-Link.