Radeon HD 5970 Single card and Crossfire review

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VGA performance: Crysis WARHEAD (DX10)

 

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.

Crysis Warhead then: we up the ante a little more by enabling DX10.

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

Check out how dominant ATI all of the sudden is in the Crytek engine with the Radeon HD 5870 and 5970 (!).

Now we test in gamers mode with DirectX 10 and 2xAA as typically that's already horribly hard for a graphics card. But since the Radeon HD 5970 has so much brutal rendering power we figured, let's switch on the very best quality mode -- Enthusiast mode, again with DX10 and 2xAA enabled. Check it out man .. 1920x1200 is still extremely playable. Nice (!)

And in the comparative chart we can start to evaluate again. This card is really really fast. Check for example a Radeon HD 4870 which is a brilliant performing card. It's pushing 26 FPS here at 1920x1200. A GeForce GTX 285 poops out 35 FPS, the GTX 295 really is going strong. But it'll have to forfeit to the Radeon HD 5970 which is pushing out a very respectable 61 FPS on average. And as you'll agree with me, these are all just chocking numbers with this game title versus out image quality settings.

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