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.

At 2560 we still have a bit of a distance to go before any single-GPU card can crack 60fps. In lieu of that Titan is the winner as expected. Leading the GTX 680 by 54%, this is Titan’s single biggest win over its predecessor, actually exceeding the theoretical performance advantage based on the increase in functional units alone. For some reason GTX 680 never did gain much in the way of performance here versus the GTX 580, and while it’s hard to argue that Titan has reversed that, it has at least corrected some of the problem in order to push more than 50% out.

In the meantime, with GTX 680’s languid performance, this has been a game the latest Radeon cards have regularly cleared. For whatever reason they’re a good match for Crysis, meaning even with all its brawn, Titan can only clear the 7970GE by 21%.

On the other hand, our multi-GPU cards are a mixed bag. Once more Titan loses to both, but the GTX 690 only leads by 15% thanks to GK104’s aforementioned weak Crysis performance. Meanwhile the 7990 takes a larger lead at 33%.

I’d also note that we’ve thrown in a “bonus round” here just to see when Crysis will be playable at 1080p with its highest settings and with 4x SSAA for that picture-perfect experience. As it stands AMD multi-GPU cards can already cross 60fps, but for everything else we’re probably a generation off yet before Crysis is completely and utterly conquered.

Moving on, we once again have minimum framerates for Crysis.

When it comes to Titan, the relative improvement in minimum framerates over GTX 680 is nothing short of obscene. Whatever it was that was holding back GTX 680 is clearly having a hard time slowing down Titan, leading to Titan offering 71% better minimum framerates. There’s clearly much more going on here than just an increase in function units.

Meanwhile, though Titan’s gains here over the 7970GE aren’t quite as high as they were with the GTX 680, the lead over the 7970GE still grows a bit to 26%. As for our mutli-GPU cards, this appears to be a case where SLI is struggling; the GTX 690 is barely faster than Titan here. Though at 31% faster than Titan, the 7990 doesn’t seem to be faltering much.

Sleeping Dogs Far Cry 3
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  • CeriseCogburn - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - link

    He's the jerk off liar you sucked up whole bud.
  • chizow - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - link

    At least he can put together a coherent sentence but compared to you, he looks like a saint.
  • CeriseCogburn - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - link

    you're his little altar boy, you should know
  • chizow - Monday, February 25, 2013 - link

    Sounds like suppressed scars and emotions from a troubled past, you should see someone about that, can't be healthy for you. Might result in lashing out uncontrollably in public ...oh wait.
  • CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, February 26, 2013 - link

    LOL - The big hate filled price crybaby conspiracist, lashing out for near a year now, the OWS mirror must be extremely painful.
  • CeriseCogburn - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link

    The crybaby fool liar amd fanboy has nothing else to offer but the exemplary issuing of brainfarts on a most regular basis, despite the corrections attempted by other for years on end.
    Forget the facts, the raging amd fanboy is blissful, but does not mean a word they say, either, and will never follow through.
    A dry empty, stupid threat of nothing.
    One can only hope the idiots grasp tightly on the rump cheeks of amd and never let go, thus when it falls into gehennna precious fanbioy will be gone with it too.
  • CeriseCogburn - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link

    They don't need your money they've got BILLIONS.

    AMD needs your money red fanboy, but then you don't have any to give them, as the amd fanboy tightwads have proven, they can destroy their own favorite company with their constant demand for free and cheap.

    We don't want crybaby loser tightwads like you supporting nVidia. Your company is the in debt failing and fired amd. Enjoy the ghetto.
  • CeriseCogburn - Wednesday, February 27, 2013 - link


    So nVidia is pulling in about 10% profit in the video card area, as recent and past years show.

    So how exactly is that greed ? This whole past year of 600 series left them with that same pathetic profit margin.

    They charge ten percent over their costs on average. Ten percent.

    You people are obviously rage filled hate bots without a clue. Ten percent is not some unreasonable scalp price.
  • UzairH - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link

    I am upgrading shortly, and for me Skyrim is a big deal when it comes to graphics performance. Vanilla Skyrim plays great on GTX 580/HD 7850 and up, but one can load a dozen hi-res texture mods and high-quality ENB mod on top of Skyrim ot make it look an order of magnitude better than vanilla Skyrim, with a consequent massive performance drop. Skyrim is also a game that does not do SLI/Crossfire well,. so it would be interesting to see what a single powerful GPU can do in it.
  • Ryan Smith - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link

    We've tested Skyrim with the high res texture pack and it's still CPU bound on high-end video cards. As for mods, as a matter of editorial policy we do not include mods in our testing due to the very frequent changes and relatively small user base.

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