Crysis: Warhead

Kicking things off as always is Crysis: Warhead. It’s no longer the toughest game in our benchmark suite, but it’s still a technically complex game that has proven to be a very consistent benchmark. Thus even four years since the release of the original Crysis, “but can it run Crysis?” is still an important question, and the answer continues to be “no.” While we’re closer than ever, full Enthusiast settings at a 60fps is still beyond the grasp of a single-GPU card.

With AMD’s GCN architecture, Crysis is finally losing some of its predictive power, but it’s still a good indicator of overall performance. And the indicators aren’t very good.

From a price/performance perspective the 7700 needs to beat at least the 6850 on the AMD side and at least the GTX 560 on the NVIDIA side in order to ensure a clear-cut victory. Unfortunately it’s falling well short of that, underperforming the 6850 by 20% never mind the GTX 560. On paper the 7770 is outgunned on everything from texture performance to ROP performance to shader performance, so take your pick on what’s holding back Crysis performance, but the end result is that it’s well behind its previous-generation peers. In fact it’s closer to the 2.5 year old 5770 than it is the 6850.

As for the 7750, things are a bit better. In spite of its massive texture and shader deficit compared to the 7770, it’s only behind by 15%, offering some strong support that the actual performance difference between the two cards won’t be nearly as big as it is on paper. That said, on a price/performance basis it should be able to beat the 5770, and it isn’t quite there. But as the only card here that’s sub -75W, it has other favorable attributes.

Elsewhere XFX’s R7770 BESDD shows us that 7770 performance scales well with clockspeeds, with a 12% core overclock netting 11% better performance. This is a good sign for overclockers, but for factory overclocked cards it’s a mixed bag, as the higher price these cards fetch only puts them more in competition with the 6870.

The story of minimum framerates is much the same. The 7700 series continues to underperform its last-generation competition by quite a bit, and unfortunately we’re still several frames per second away from being able to sustain 30fps+ in Crysis at 1680.

VCE & The Test Metro: 2033
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  • Oxford Guy - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link

    What I'd like to know is why the 7950 is shown in the Idle temp charts and then vanishes from the Load temp charts.
  • Oxford Guy - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link

    Sorry.. Power consumption charts.

    I'd like to see the 7950/7970 load power consumption. The idle consumption is less interesting and that's where they're shown.
  • dananski - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link

    Me too, the 6850 was worse than the 5850, so I'd expected it to be easily beaten by this generation's 770. Then again, the 6770 was just a 5770, so I suppose I should've learned that the mid-range is barely moving.
  • designerfx - Thursday, February 16, 2012 - link

    if you think about the fact of it's price today then it will probably be down substantially in a month - at which point it'd be quite competitive.
  • ce12373 - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link

    Hmmm. This AMD story sounds like a lot of other AMD stories (cough*cough "BULLDOZER"). Maybe no one has piledriven the point home to AMD yet. Oh well.
  • medi01 - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link

    Right, and it's a long time that nVidiai stopped producing overpriced "you can fry pancackes with these" GPUs and even hold performance crown? Oh, it's still producing them and AMD still hold performance crown? What a pity.

    Oh, but AMD went nVidia route with "confuse consumer more" naming scheme? How shameless, do they pay royalties for this to nVidia, the inventor of this rubbish?
  • aguilpa1 - Wednesday, February 15, 2012 - link

    AMD has been doing the name bait and switch just as long as Nvidia but since your such a fan boy apparently you haven't noticed. It is obvious from your overheated GPU remarks that you are stuck on some ancient review of a past Nvidia product. And again, AMD has done the same, also in the past, 2900XT anyone?
  • CeriseCogburn - Wednesday, March 21, 2012 - link

    The GTX 590 still holds the single card crown.
    The very strange situation that has occurred is amd holding the single core card crown with 7970, finally passing the 580 after a year or closer to two and I don't remember how long.
    This single core crown is gone already gone with the GTX680 benches leaked a few days early.
    So amd finally did hold a crown for once in a very long time, for a very short time, 2.5 months or so....with most of that time in very weak or absent stock on retail shelves.

  • Spunjji - Thursday, June 21, 2012 - link

    BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH
  • Reticence - Monday, June 24, 2013 - link

    You realize you're kinda the laughing stock of anandtech right? You wait with baited breath for every post remotely including AMD somewhere in the article to give you the opportunity to suck off nvidia and intel. I literally think you might need psychiatric help with that raging superiority complex, then again I've always thought there should be specially designed concentration camps for people like you who never grew out of acting like a blow-hard highschool kid.

    Oh well, down to business.

    Two 7970's (And I mean two 7970's, NOT a 7990) perform better than one Titan, EVERY benchmark has shown it, you can not deny this. And I already know what you're doing to say "BUT THAT'S 2 CARDS VS. 1, NOT FAIR ;[" But see, this is the main point that proves you're a major fucking moron. That.does.not.matter.at.all.

    The the Titan is 1000$.
    Two 7970's are 800$.

    And while yes, it's impressive that a single card can hold it's own against two, it doesn't matter, who is going to spend 200$ more for LESS performance? I'm sure you'll also say "you're just an AMD fanboy." Wrong, I just don't like to waste my money. And I really, really, don't like you.

    Nuff said.

    Oh and by the way, read it and weep, pussy.

    http://www.semiaccurate.com/forums/showpost.php?p=...

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