Game performance - Crysis WarHEAD

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.

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
• Code path DX10
• Anti-aliasing 2xMSAA
• In game Quality mode Gamer

Crysis Warhead is a game title that likes 2 CPU cores AND likes faster clocked processors. But observe how incredibly close all setups are in game performance after 1280x1024; that's your average GPU limitation. We are using a Radeon HD 5870 here by the way. Much topic of debate is that the Phenom II X6 is slower in peak game performance, that is true. If you'd be free from game engine and GPU limitations, the Core i7 98)X would be 20 to 25% faster. But the reality is also that 980X is 300% more expensive, always keep that in mind.

We'll also show the overclocked results. The blue line represents the Core i7 980X and the the orange and red line the processor overclocked at 4.5 GHz.

Mind you that we use GPU setups that 95% of you guys actually use at home. Would we have opted multi-GPU solutions, the differences would be far more extensive as you free the PC from GPU bottlenecks.