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.

With Crysis: Warhead, 60fps at 1080p with everything turned up remains the realm of the GTX 770 and other higher-end cards. The GTX 760 can only muster 49.8fps, which means it would be necessary to at least drop MSAA here to get the GTX 760 above 60fps. This also puts the GTX 760 about 7% behind the 7950B, which enjoys the usual AMD architecture advantage in this game.

On a side note, this is one of those titles that really benefits from ROPs, driving a very large wedge between the GTX 760 and the outgoing GTX 660 Ti. The 20% performance improvement at our highest 1080p settings is definitely atypical, but it’s a good example of where going from 7 SMX + 24 ROPs to 6 SMX + 32 ROPs can pay off handsomely.

Minimum framerates continue the trend we saw with our averages. The GTX 760 continues to trail the 7950B here while significantly outperforming the GTX 660 Ti.

Sleeping Dogs Far Cry 3
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  • kishorshack - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link

    Looks like the GPU gains over a two year cycle is more than CPU gains
    Spending on GPU's is more worth while than Spending on CPU's
    Specially if you start from Sandy Bridge in CPU's
  • DanNeely - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link

    3D Rendering is a trivially parallelizable workload. As a result it can roughly double in performance with each full node process shrink just by keeping the core design the same but putting twice as many of them on the die. Real world behavior differs mostly in that some of the additional die space is used to enable things that weren't practical before instead of just making all the existing features twice as fast.
  • wumpus - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link

    That is only strictly true if you are willing to use twice as much electricity and generate/remove twice as much heat (it could approach costing twice as much as well, but not nearly as often). A good chunk of each update needs to go to making the GPU have a higher TFLOP/W or the thing will melt.
  • ewood - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link

    luckily many of those issues are mitigated by transition to a smaller process node, as DanNeeley said. your statement is more applicable to dual die cards, not new processors having twice the functional units.
  • maltanar - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link

    That is unfortunately no longer true, smaller processes do not benefit from the so-called 'Dennard scaling' anymore, without a lot of trickery from semiconductor engineers.
  • DanNeely - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link

    They may have to work harder at it; but as long as they're able to continue doing what you refer to as trickery, the result for us end users is the same.
  • tential - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link

    CPU gains have been made, just not in performance. We don't need performance on the CPU side for a LOT of applications. Like I always say, if you had double the CPU performance, you still wouldn't gain much FPS in most games.

    Intel would be cannibalizing it's higher end processors if it kept making CPU gains. Instead, it focuses on power consumption, to fit better CPUs into smaller things such as notebooks, tablets, etc. Look at the Macbook Air Review and then tell me we haven't made CPU gains.
  • UltraTech79 - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link

    More worthwhile than what? What are you even talking about? Today's i5 chips arnt the bottleneck to any of the GPUs here in any game. So what you're saying is irrelevant.
  • ericore - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link

    Aint that the truth, the biggest change was from the 500 series to the 600 series.
    The 600 series make most radeons look like dinosaurs or AMD processors.
    Intel is dicking around giving us less than 10% speed inprovement in each generation.
    Can't wait for AMD to release their steamroller 8 core, except where latency is crucial it will match haswell and cost a fraction. Haswell will still technically be faster, but only in benchmarks, in practice they will be identical. The change from piledriver to steamroller is like from a a pentium 4 to a core 2 duo. It's not a new architecture, but has so many improvements that it ought to be called one.
  • MarcVenice - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link

    I checked all the games, and the first 4-5 games the 7950 Boost wins, the other the GTX 760 wins. I didn't add up the numbers, but are you guys sure the HD 7950 Boost is 8% slower overall?

    And what's anandtech's stance on frametimes/fcat? Are those only used when problems arise, new games? I realize they take a lot of time, but I think they can be quite valuable in determing which card is the fastest.

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