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 wanted to push 4x AA here we see too much HDD activity, affecting the framerate dramatically, disallowing an objective measurement of our test run.

So 2x AA in combo with the gamers quality mode is what we test at, which looks incredible to be honest.

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

It's not different with Crysis, the Sapphire card definitely shows muscle, but you'll need to stick at roughly 1600x1200. It's the nature of this game engine really.

Once we start to compare the cards we see the PowerColor card going first base with the GTX 275. I've said this in the Sapphire Toxic review as well, with Crysis WarHEAD being totally dominant to NVIDIA cards, that is quite an accomplishment. Very nice.