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.

DirectX 9

Crysis Warhead is a recent top 10 title as well. Our image quality settings; we opt for the gamers mode. However for this article, we select both DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 mode as well to allow way more hefty shader code which will take a big toll on the GPU, and also frame buffer utilization.

• Level Ambush
• Codepath DX9
• Anti-Aliasing 2x MSAA
• In game Quality mode Gamer

In the lower resolutions there's a small advantage for NVIDIA, then performance gets really close. But granted, a win for NVIDIA in DX9. Let's peek at DX10.

DirectX 10

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 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.

Surprisingly, we see very similar performance compared to DX9. The difference in overall is like 5% inbetween DX9 adn DX10. Again we see NVIDIA have an advantage here. Though these numbers are close, it still matches up to 7 to 10% of performance up-to 1920x1200.