DX10: Crysis Warhead

DX10: Crysis Warhead

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 that 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, which 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

And in the comparative performance chart above, we can start to evaluate again. We are seeing average performance and numbers, across the board. However if you peek upwards one chart, you'll notice that at 2560x1600 performance really kicks in. So let's increase image quality settings and see if that scales better.

Above is the Enthusiast mode in SLIm 2xAA - DX10 Enthusiast quality setting enabled. It is the absolute best image quality settings that can be enabled in Crysis, originally designed for future hardware and to date, spanking even the graphics cards released this year.

And here we place that into perspective, DX10 in Enthusiast mode at 2xAA. Mind you that with 8xAA you only loose 2 maybe 3 FPS on average.