Performance gaming: 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). 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

Again we have a game titles that likes more than 2 CPU cores AND likes faster clocked processors very much. We can see proof of that with the Dual core X2 7750 BE @ 2700 MHz. Three or more cores result into very similar performance behavior.

But yes, as small as it is, overclocking does matter. We gain a little additional performance, but only up-to 1280x1024 after which one of the fastest single GPU based graphics card on the planet becomes a bottleneck, slows down and normalizes the framerate.

And that is your reality for gaming. Even with a graphics card of this caliber, if you game at 1600x1200 the performance differences are horribly minimal as it's a stage where most processors will be fast enough.

Right, I think you guys have seen so many numbers that you must be getting a little dizzy, let's wrap things up and mover onwards to our conclusion.