Hell's Highway, another WWII shooter some might say. But in reality the setting of war is really just a vehicle for Gearbox to tell the storyline of a Band of Brothers led by you, Sergeant Matt Baker, as they deal with the madness and consequences of war. The game tells the story of Operation Market Garden in the country where yours truly lives, in the Netherlands (aka Holland). It's about the besieged journey from Eindhoven to Arnhem where tremendous battles were fought.

Exactly that road, Highway 69; the road from Eindhoven to Arnhem was later nicknamed: Hell's Highway.

One of the most impressive details is that the area of Operation Market Garden was completely reconstructed using historical documents and images. It's uncanny to see and experience the design of 1944 Holland. Even now in 2008 you can still see striking similarities from our country. Street signs, building structures, clothing and even the clinker bricks on the roads dispense a true authentic mood. This reviewer is Dutch, so what level would be more appropriate than one of the starting levels, in a field in the Netherlands, moving towards a large windmill ahead of us. Lots of geometry is to be found here, and in fact one of the more complex scenes to render for the GPU. Yes, welcome to Holland.

• Texture Quality HIGH
• Shadow Texture Quality HIGH
• Shadow Detail HIGH
• Vsync OFF

Check that out, we see Quad GPU GTX 295 scale completely shitty in BIA. No clue, obviously a driver issue. And yes, it's the same for the 4870 X2 in Xfire.

BIA is one of those titles where neither ATI or NVIDIA are focusing on, as it's not a priority game anymore. This is a classic example of what can happen when drivers do not support the game. A shame really.

Crysis WARHEAD

As in last year's game, expect to encounter dense jungle environments, barren ice fields, Korean soldiers and plenty of flying aliens. There's no denying that this is more of the same, except here it's a more tightly woven experience with a little less freedom to explore.

With a top-end PC (although Warhead has supposedly benefited from an improved game engine, you'll still need a fairly beefy system) rest assured, developer Crytek has enhanced more than just the graphics engine.

Vehicles are more fun to drive, firefights are more intense and focused, and aliens do more than just float around you. More emphasis on the open-ended environments would have been welcome, but a more exciting (though shorter) campaign, a new multiplayer mode, and a whole bunch of new maps make Crysis Warhead an excellent expansion to one of last year's best shooters.

Crysis Warhead has good looks. As mentioned before, the game looks better than Crysis, and it runs better too. Our test machine that struggled a bit to run the original at high settings ran Warhead smoothly with the same settings. Yet as much as you may have heard about Crysis' technical prowess, you'll still be impressed when you feast your eyes on the swaying vegetation, surging water, and expressive animations. Outstanding graphics. Couldn't say more here.

We up the ante a little more by enabling DX10. Though we really wanted to push 4x AA here, we notice that current day graphics cards yet again run out of memory, and you'll notice the HDD activity going up a lot. That would affect the framerate dramatically disallowing an objective measurement of our time demo. So 2x AA in combo with the gamers quality mode is what we need to test with.

• Level Ambush
• Codepath DX10
• Anti-Aliasing 2x MSAA
• In game Quality mode Gamer

The bad performance at 2560x1600 has everything to do with a lack of frame buffer (graphics memory). In that resolution in combo with our image quality settings there's just so much HDD swapping going on that it ruins performance completely.

Let's focus on 1920x1200. The GTX 295 in SLI definitely shows a gain in performance, it's not very much though. At 1600x1200 apparently it kicks in pretty good, very interesting to see really.

For the X2 we again stumbled into a situation where the cards as likely only rendering with two GPUs.