Crysis Warhead Test

Crysis Warhead is an expansion pack based on the original Crysis video game. Crysis Warhead is based in the future, where an ancient alien spacecraft has been discovered beneath the Earth on an island east of the Philippines. Crysis Warhead uses a refined version of the CryENGINE2 graphics engine. Like Crysis, Warhead uses the Microsoft Direct3D 10 (DirectX 10) API for graphics rendering.

Benchmark Reviews uses the HOC Crysis Warhead benchmark tool to test and measure graphic performance using the Airfield 1 demo scene. This short test places a high amount of stress on a graphics card because of detailed terrain and textures, but also for the test settings used. Using the DirectX 10 test with Very High Quality settings, the Airfield 1 demo scene receives 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering to create maximum graphic load and separate the products according to their performance.

Using the highest quality DirectX 10 settings with 4x AA and 16x AF, only the most powerful graphics cards are expected to perform well in our Crysis Warhead benchmark tests. DirectX 11 extensions are not supported in Crysis: Warhead, and SSAO is not an available option.

The ATI Radeon HD 5770 does well, especially considering it's only meant as a lower mid-level graphics solution, yet still falls short of the GeForce GTX 260 and Radeon HD 4890 which share the same 21 frames per second performance. There are a few frames between the Radeon HD 5850 and the overclocked ASUS GeForce GTX 285 TOP, but at 1920x1280 those differences disappear. The Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 5870 model 21161-00-50R video card doesn't flex its muscle in this NVIDIA-optimized game the way it does in DirectX 11, but it still outperforms the GTX 285 within the same price point.

For the dual-GPU products, the NVIDIA GTX 295 muscles its way to the #2 position ahead of the Radeon HD 5870, but it falls very short of matching performance with the ATI Radeon HD 5970. At 1920x1200 resolution the GTX 295 produces only 27 FPS, and while this is still better than the HD5870's 23 FPS or the overclocked GTX285's 21 FPS, it's 44% behind the Radeon HD5970's 39 FPS. The single HD5970 actually comes close to doubling the performance of a single HD5850, but also consumes far less power in it's factory 'underclocked' state.

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