10 - 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
• Ingame 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 as for example 1920x1200 would use something near 1200 to 1300MB MB of video memory. Since anno 2008 not one card has that kind of memory or power, the gamers mode is a more comparable setting. Now if you say, but dude ... the X2 has 2048MB of memory ? Correct, yet the memory is cloned per GPU. Meaning that each GPU has a partition of 1024MB assigned and both the 1024MB partition carry the same set of textures, shaders etc etc

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. That would effect the frame rate dramatically disallowing an objective measurement of our time demo. So 2xAA in combo with the gamers quality mode is what we test with.

Note -- I have not had the time yet to test NVIDIA cards as we need to replicate the installation on the NVIDIA test system, that's the reason why it's (not yet) included in our tests. I did throw in an X2 and surprise .. Crossfire seems to be working perfectly fine in Crysis Warhead, where in Crysis itself it is being such a bitch.

As you can understand our in-game quality settings right now are very hefty, but we take this path so that in a year from now we can still use this benchmark and scale perfectly with next generations graphics cards. Besides, I just demand very good IQ, don't you ?

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 little faster than in WarHEAD.