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, we can start to evaluate again. We are seeing very similar performance and numbers, across the board. The extra framebuffer definitely helps out in this title though. Scaling is grand for one card. But with CrossfireX we stumble into sheer and utter CPU limitation.
As such, let's kick the settings up a notch and see what happens shall we?
Above we enabled Enthusiast quality mode with 2xAA and all image quality settings flicked to HIGH. As you can see the R6990 deals with the settings extremely well. Even at 2560x1600 we can easily play the game properly. So let's take it up one notch more.
CrossfireX, well just look at 2560x1600 -- the four GPUs definitely do justice once they got stuff to work with. That's actually very impressive scaling.
Now with results that good and with that massive 4 GB of graphics memory, we figured AA can't have a huge impact right? So let's take it up one notch more... 8xAA DX10 mode AND Enthusiast mode is enabled above. Compare a single R6990 and the R6990 in CrossfireX -- nice.
And one more in the Enthusiast mode ... over time we wrote down the numbers of other cards in enthusiast mode/DX10/2xAA as well, here's a nice chart showing you the raw unadulterated performance this card is capable of.
And hey now, one more chart with multi-GPU setups included. So here we are comparing with other multi-GPU setups in DX10 Enthusiast mode and 2xAA. This test, next to Metro and 3Dmark 11 we consider to be the definitive scaling test.
Yeah, testing with 4 GPUs ain't an easy thing to accomplish, you'll need to have all the variables right.
