VGA performance: Crysis WARHEAD (DX10)

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.

We up the ante a little more by enabling DX10. Though we really want to push 4x AA here, we notice that current day graphics cards yet again run out of video memory, as results you'll notice the HDD activity going up a lot. That would affect the framerate dramatically disallowing an objective measurement of our time demo. So 2x AA in combo with the gamers quality mode is what we need to test with.

• Level Ambush
• Codepath DX10
• Anti-Aliasing 2x MSAA
• In game Quality mode Gamer

Here's where things get a little interesting. We see a lot of fluctuations in the performance among the cards. The settings we opted for will fish out any blockage in the system anywhere. The X2 for example needs an awful lot of CPU processing, as a result it's really CPU bottlenecked. The BFG GTX 295 H2O is showing and flexing muscle like a bodybuilder on steroids. Until it reaches 2560x1600... where the limitation would be video memory.

So the proper thing to do here is to look at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 as that is extremely playable. We tried it btw, if we disable Anti-aliasing completely and clear up some videocard memory, the score at 2560x1600 jumps up.