Published in Graphics

Geforce GTX 580M is not enough for DX11 Crysis 2

by on06 July 2011


Alienware MX18 at 1920x1080
The DirectX 11 patch for Crysis 2 is finally out and we have been playing with that in our lab for a few days now.

In addition to the patch, we had a chance to see one of the most powerful notebooks on planet earth, Alienware MX18 a massive notebook with a lot of graphics muscle and CPU power. The “notebook” is powered by the recently launched Geforce GTX 580 mobile chip and you can imagine our surprise when we learned that this chip is not enough to run Crysis 2 at 1920x1080 at more than 20 FPS. It was stuttering in DirectX 11 and it was going really smooth in DirectX 9 mode.

It turns out that for Crysis 2 at this resolution and DirectX 11 settings and everything at highest possible, you need at least two of these cards. To put things in perspective, Alienware US charges $1,200 for two Geforce GTX 580M with 2GB GDDR5 each and you can imagine that this is a lot of money.

The base price of the rig with Geforce GTX 460M graphics starts at $2,149 and jumps to a shocking $3,349 when you add these two cards. In the German market MX18 prices start at €1999 and two Geforce GTX 580M cards are still not available. The UK the model starts at £1699 again misses the two GTX 580 M that might show up shortly as an option.

So Crysis 2 for notebook users at HD and with DirectX 11 will be a thing for extremely rich folks and for the rest we think a desktop is a much better idea.
Last modified on 07 July 2011
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