Athlon II X2 250 and Phenom II X2 550 BE review - Game performance - Crysis WarHEAD

Crysis WARHEAD

As in last years 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.

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 big toll on the GPU, yet also frame buffer utilization.

• Level Ambush
• Codepath DX10
• Anti aliasing 2xMSAA
• Ingame Quality mode Gamer

Crysis WarHEAD is a game title that really likes more than 2 CPU cores AND likes faster clocked processors. But observe how incredibly close all processors really are in game performance once we pass 1280x1024. And again, bear in mind that we are using a high-end GeForce GTX 280 BFG OC edition here.

Opposed to the previous tested game, Crysis is a more GPU bound title, but that does not change the fact that say a Core i7 965 would suddenly open up a can of performance. But let's overclock and see what happens with the 550BE versus Crysis performance once it hits 3700 MHz.

Overclocking does matter. We gain a little additional performance in the lowest resolutions. But the minute we pass 1280x1024, we run into GPU limitations much quicker. This is why for gaming faster GPUs matter way more than faster processors.