Crysis Warhead Analysis

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Like in CoD, we are seeing NVIDIA dominated performance. AMD's 3-way solutions can hold their own against the rest of the hardarwe out there, but NVIDIA sets the bar here in terms of raw performance.

While other tests don't show any real need for 3-way graphics, Crysis isn't playable at 2560x1600 with single GPU options under these settings. Even at lower resolutions Crysis just seems to absorb what's thrown at it. The 512MB parts do take a bigger hit at the highest resolution than the higher memory hardware out there also.

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Scaling is decent, but we would prefer it to be higher even so considering that to get closer to getting what you pay for we would need to see 200% scaling with 3 cards. NVIDIA hardware seems to scale much better than AMD hardware in this test.

1680x1050    1920x1200    2560x1600

Looking at how the hardware scales from 2 to 3 GPUs, we can see that AMD's 4870 1GB shows good improvement despite the fact that it trails in the 1 to 3 GPU scaling chart. 512MB hardware struggles a lot in this as well. The other hardware does scale really well up at 2560x1600 where it counts.

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Because this game is very graphically intense even when not set to the maximum settings, not all the cards can score any "value" even at the lowest resolution. The ATI Radeon HD 4850 fails to break the 25fps barrier in any test, so it gets a value of zero across the board. The 9800 GTX+ 2-way option isn't that shabby until 2560x1600, and the 4850 X2 posts some good value. We still have single cards at the top of the value chart until we hit 2560x1600 where single cards fail to offer any value (as well as some 2-way solutions). At that point 2-way solutions that offer some level of passable performance give more for the money with the GTX 260 3-way option leading the pack of our recently added tests.

This game shows the most casualties in terms of our value threshold, but hopefully it will help show which cards are actually worth comparing here.