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

Crysis is mostly added for scaling and ranking reasons rather than anything else.

And in the comparative performance chart we can start to evaluate again. Check that our, have you ever seen a Radeon based card ranking this high in Crysis ? So if we have that much performance at our disposal ... then let's see how it does in that uber ridiculous Enthusiast rendering mode as well.:

Check it out, we moved from Gamer quality mode towards the Enthusiast rendering mode.

• Level Ambush
• Codepath DX10
• Anti-Aliasing 2x MSAA
• In game quality mode Enthusiast

So we noticed a request in our forums to show what performance is like when we switch to Enthusiast mode settings, so here you go. 2xAA - DX10 Enthusiast quality setting enabled. Enthusiast mode is the absolute best image quality settings that can be enabled in Crysis, originally designed for future hardware and to date, spanking even the most high-end graphics cards available. The ARES manages it well, really well actually. 1920x1200 would be perfectly playable with 2xAA enabled and everything maxed out image quality wise.