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

  • ninjaquick - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link

    Delta Percentages: The 7990 just needs to be removed, it skews the whole chart way too much.
  • Brainling - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link

    It's a nice card, but not nice enough for me to upgrade my 670. If it had been a slightly more paired down GK110, I would have considered it...but the performance gains are just not enough to justify replacing my 670 (which still has little trouble with most games).

    I'll spend my computing dollar on going from Sandy Bridge -> Haswell instead, and wait for the eventual 800 series sometime next year (which should be a new micro architecture).
  • The0ne - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link

    "... the rest of the year will be a battle of prices and bundles."

    Can't wait.
  • Runadumb - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link

    Firstly Thank you for the detailed review.

    Right, I could pull the trigger on two of these (when they come out with 4GB versions) as they are 85%+ above my current 2x570GTX's. Thanks for having 570's in the results by the way.

    My BIG question is: Is the proper next-gen cards still due early next year or is this all we've got for the next 18 months? The rumour mill is fine here.

    As I run 3 displays and a 6000x1080p resolution I literally can never have too much performance. So if waiting until next year meant I get a better upgrade I'm happy to do it. This system can just about keep me going right now.

    I may abandon the 3 screen setup for a consumer version Oculus Rift but how long away is that? I want to hedge my bets.
  • jwcalla - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link

    I think Maxwell is going to be more like mid-2014. It seems aggressive though... a new architecture, a shrink to 20nm and they're shoe-horning a 64-bit ARM chip in there. Lots of opportunities for delays IMO. But it might be a wise idea to wait... NVIDIA is promising (read: take with a grain of salt) 3x "GFLOPS per watt" over Kepler, and about 7-8x over Fermi. It's hard to predict how that will scale into performance though.
  • Ryan Smith - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link

    It would be historically accurate to state that NVIDIA typically releases new architectures on new nodes, and that both Maxwell and TSMC 20nm are scheduled for 2014. When in 2014 is currently something only NVIDIA could tell you.

    But I would say this: consider this the half-time show. This is the mid-generation refresh, so we're roughly half-way between the launch of Kepler and Maxwell.
  • araczynski - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link

    Hopefully by the time I replace my aging E8500/6970 system (which still plays everything I care about pretty well at 1080p) with a haswell, this thing will have a 4GB option so i can make another long lasting rig.
  • xdesire - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link

    Ok i see that this is an overclocked/tweaked GTX 680 but what in the hell is that TDP?
  • !HEADHUNTERZ! - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link

    Soooo...where does the GTX 670 FTW compare to the GTX 770!? Theyre both the same price! So which one would be a better decision to make?
  • JPForums - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link

    They won't be priced the same for long. Unfortunately, I just can't see a GTX670FTW beating a GTX770 (especially with a factory overclock). I wonder if there is enough overclocking headroom for a GTX770FTW.

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now