Any one person could look at pictures of Bohemia Interactive Studios’ ArmA II and Crytek’s Crysis, tilt their head this way and that and decide one looks better – and it’s guaranteed that any second or third person would disagree. ArmA II, as the spiritual and direct successor of Operation: Flashpoint and Armed Assault (ArmA) respectively, certainly had me near tears with its brilliance. Just recently a handy little announcement – detailing ArmA II’s system requirements – has come around. So, why not compare system requirements for the two games?
ArmA II’s minimum requirements are:
- Windows XP / Vista
- Dual-Core CPU
- 512 MB Ram
- Graphics card with 256 MB-VRAM and Shader Model 3.0 support
While it’s recommended requirements are as follows:
- Windows XP / Vista
- Quad-Core CPU
- 1 GB Ram
- Graphics card with 512 MB-VRAM and Shader Model 3.0 support
On to Crysis, which has been released for more than a year. Its minimum requirements include,
- Windows XP/Vista
- Intel Pentium 4 2.8 GHz (3.2 GHz for Vista), Intel Core 2.0 GHz (2.2 GHz for Vista), AMD Athlon 2800+ (3200+ for Vista) or better
- 1GB (1.5GB on Windows Vista)
- NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT, ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (Radeon X800 Pro for Vista) or better with 256MB V-RAM
Its recommended requirements, however, are:
- Windows XP/Vista
- Core 2 Duo/Athlon X2 or better
- 1.5 GB RAM
- NVIDIA 7800 Series, ATI Radeon 1800 Series or better with 512MB of graphics memory V-RAM
Both are balanced in terms of V-RAM required but Crysis takes up more RAM, while ArmA II requires a quad-core CPU. This isn’t to say the former wouldn’t benefit from the addition of more cores – after all, Crysis is one of the first games to be designed specifically for taking advantage of multi-core architecture. Every one knows a multi-core CPU really begins to shine in real-world conditions, with explosions going off, soldiers darting about, gun-fire being exchanged and vehicles rampaging – the kind of situations where delegating different computation portions to different cores of the CPU is most useful. If Crysis cemented its future-proof nature with its dual-core compatibility, has ArmA II taken the next step? Has it mastered the quad-core architecture? Further testing will reveal the truth, but until then, hears a nice video comparison to fuel the flames of graphical discussion.
2 Responses to “How Does ArmA II Measure Up To Crysis?”
Maybe I am being skeptical here, but the graphics for Arma2 don’t look much better than BF2 and CoD4. Nothing real fancy about them. While the choppers look nice, still nothing that really leaps out and makes you go OOOH and AAAAH like Crysis did.
I see where you’re coming from. Which is why I didn’t outright feel like saying that ArmA II looks better than Crysis. However, I very much liked the animation in several places and if a little more work is put in, I feel it could still be very solid usually. As for the helicopters…BI Studios, was part of the original Operation Flashpoint, the 1st FPS to incorporate a helicopter as a vehicle, so it’s a given that the choppers will look and feel as realistic as in real-life.
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