Crysis: Warhead

Up next is our legacy title for 2013, Crysis: Warhead. The stand-alone expansion to 2007’s Crysis, at over 4 years old Crysis: Warhead can still beat most systems down. Crysis was intended to be future-looking as far as performance and visual quality goes, and it has clearly achieved that. We’ve only finally reached the point where single-GPU cards have come out that can hit 60fps at 1920 with 4xAA.

Crysis: Warhead is another title that generally favors AMD cards, to the GTX 770’s detriment. Not that anyone does particularly well at 2560, while at 1920 with Enthusiast quality we see the GTX 770 trailing the 7970 by a couple of frames per second, and the 7970GE by several more (13%). The extra memory bandwidth is helping the GTX 770 to some extent here, pushing it above the GTX 680 by 7%, but it’s not a title GK104 excels at, with the GTX 770 only surpassing the GTX 570 by 57%.

Minimum framerates are generally a repeat of our average framerates here, leading to the GTX 770 falling behind both AMD cards. Even the gains over the GTX 570 aren’t very good, with just a 39% improvement at 1920.

Sleeping Dogs Far Cry 3
Comments Locked

117 Comments

View All Comments

  • chizow - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link

    They are both overpriced relative to their historical cost/pricing, as a result you see Nvidia has posted record margins last quarter, and will probably do similarly well again.
  • Razorbak86 - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link

    Cool! I'm both a customer and a shareholder, but my shares are worth a hell of a lot more than my SLi cards. :)
  • antef - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link

    I'm not happy that NVIDIA threw power efficiency to the wind this generation. What is with these GPU manufacturers that they can't seem to CONSISTENTLY focus on power efficiency? It's always...."Oh don't worry, next gen will be better we promise," then it finally does get better, then next gen sucks, then again it's "don't worry, next gen we'll get power consumption down, we mean it this time." How about CONTINUING to focus on it? Imagine any other product segment where a 35%! power increase would be considered acceptable, there is none. That makes a 10 or whatever FPS jump not impressive in the slightest. I have a 660 Ti which I feel has an amazing speed to power efficiency ratio, looks like this generation definitely needs to be sat out.
  • jwcalla - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link

    It's going to be hard to get a performance increase without sacrificing some power while using the same architecture. You pretty much need a new architecture to get both.
  • jasonelmore - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link

    or a die shrink
  • Blibbax - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link

    As these cards have configurable TDP, you get to choose your own priorities.
  • coldpower27 - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link

    There isn't much you can really do when your working with the same process node and same architecture, the best you can hope for is a slight bump in efficiency at the same performance level but if you increase performance past the sweet spot, you sacrifice efficiency.

    In past generation you had half node shrinks. GTX 280 -> GTX 285 65nm to 55nm and hence reduced power consumption.

    Now we don't, we have jumped straight from 55nm -> 40nm -> 28nm, with the next 20nm node still aways out. There just isn't very much you can do right now for performance.
  • JDG1980 - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link

    Yes, this is really TSMC's fault. They've been sitting on their ass for too long.
  • tynopik - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link

    maybe a shade of NVIDIA green for the 770 in the charts instead of AMD red?
  • joel4565 - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link

    Looks like an interesting part. If for no other reason that to put pressure on AMD's 7950 Ghz card. I imagine that card will be dropping to 400ish very soon.

    I am not sure what card to pick up this summer. I want to buy my first 2560x1440 monitor (leaning towards Dell 2713hm) this summer, but that means I need a new video card too as my AMD 6950 is not going to have the muscle for 1440p. It looks like both the Nvida 770 and AMD 7950 Ghz are borderline for 1440p depending on the game, but there is a big price jump to go to the Nvidia 780.

    I am also not a huge fan of crossfire/sli although I do have a compatible motherboard. Also to preempt the 2560/1440 vs 2560/1600 debate, yes i would of course prefer more pixels, but most of the 2560x1600 monitors I have seen are wide gamut which I don't need and cost 300-400 more. 160 vertical pixels are not worth 300-400 bucks and dealing with the Wide gamut issues for programs that aren't compatible.

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now