13 - Game Performance: Crysis WARHEAD | Crysis

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 the gamers mode. However, we select DirectX 10 mode as well to allow way more heft shader code which will take a hefty toll on the GPU, yet also frame buffer utilization.

• Level Ambush
• Codepath DX10
• Anti aliasing 2xMSAA
• In-game 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.

Now this was the first NVIDIA card that i had a chance to test with our benchmark. So I decided to place it directly against the competition. As you can see, the GTX 260 OC has a 10% lead in the lower resolutions after which thing get real cozy at 1920x1200 and higher.

Gaming: Crysis - Single Player v1.2

With mankind facing an alien cataclysm, your elite Delta force and North Korean forces combine, united by common humanity in a battle to save Earth. Graphically stunning, tactically challenging and always intensely immersive, Crysis sets player choice at the heart of its gameplay, with customizable tactical weaponry and adaptable armor allowing instant response to changing conditions. Crysis doesn't feel all that different from its predecessor, Far Cry. Both are set on an island. Both involve a latent alien menace. Both bid you move more or less linearly through shaggy jungle areas, where the fact that you're progressing in a single direction is camouflaged by your ability to approach obstacles in your path any way you like. Think the "every time you play a situation yields radically different behaviors and results" approach in games like Rainbow Six Vegas or Gears of War except on more of a geographic scale.

Image Quality setting:

• 0x Anti Aliasing
• 16x anisotropic filtering
• Medium image quality settings

Back to the 'old' Crysis then. Again, that's not bad at all, we are using an extremely heavy on the GPU scene here. Up-to 1920x1200 this works well. It seems, without AA the Radeon is a teeny weenie faster in WarHEAD.