14 - Multi GPU Crysis WarHEAD (1)

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). But 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.

Crysis Warhead is new in our benchmark suite. Our image quality settings -- we opt for the gamers mode. However, we select DirectX 10 mode as well to allow for way more hefty shader code which will take a hefty toll on the GPU, yet also frame buffer utilization.

• Level Ambush
• Code path DX10
• Anti Aliasing 2xMSAA
• In game Quality mode Gamer

This setting equals "High" quality mode in the old Crysis. We could opt for enthusiast mode, but really... that mode is not yet ready for today's graphics cards. We up the ante a little more though, and apply 2 levels of anti-aliasing. Though we really wanted to push 4xAA here, we notice that current day graphics cards yet again run out of frame buffer and you'll notice the HDD activity going up a lot.

ATI Radeon HD 4870 CrossfireX (2 GPUs - 2 Cards)

Now, we apply such massive image quality settings that I need to ask you throughout this session to ignore the 2560x1600 resolution. Why do I say this ? Not one of the configurations has video memory for the GPU. That particular resolution with our IQ settings eats away over 1300 MB of video memory and then system memory. As a result it starts to swap frames back and forth in the frame buffer and then tops it off with massive HDD load. It's a mess.

So up to 1920x1200 is what is very reliable and what you should observe. And observe that the faster platform definitely matters already with a "low-end" 4870 Crossfire setup.

ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 CrossfireX (4 GPUs - 2 Cards)

Now when we look at 4870 X2 in CrossfireX we only see a very tiny performance increase. Therefore we doubt that the Catalyst 8.10 driver kick in at Crossfire, in fact we're sure of it. Too bad.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 SLI (2 GPUs - 2 Cards)

Two GTX 260... again amazing to see what the CPU can do to help here.