AMD Phenom II X4 920 and 940 review test - Game performance - Crysis WARHEAD

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 way more hefty shader code which will take a heavy toll on the GPU, yet also frame buffer utilization.

• Level Ambush
• Codepath DX10
• Anti Aliasing 2xMSAA
• Ingame 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 4x AA 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 a lot.

Anyway, WOAAAAH, look at how close performance really is. On the lower resolutions the Core i7 processor is a few frames faster, and in the higher resolutions, the Phenom II Dragon platform.

And yes, overclocking does matter. We gain some more performance, but only up to 1280x1024 after which fastest single GPU based graphics card on the planet becomes a bottleneck, slows down and normalizes the framerate.