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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  • piiman - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link

    Yes a $1000.00 GPU is a luxury. Don't want luxury use the on board GPU and have a blast! :-)
  • CeriseCogburn - Sunday, February 24, 2013 - link

    ANY GPU over about $100 to $150 bucks is a LUXURY PRODUCT.

    Of course we can get you a brand spankin new gpu for $20 after rebate DX11 capable with a gig of ram, GTX 600 series, ready to rock out, even fit in your HTPC.

    So stop playing so stupid and so ridiculous. Why is stupidity so cool and so popular with you puke brains ?

    A hundred bucks can get one a very reasonable GPU that will play everything now available with a quite tolerable eye candy pain level, so the point is dummy, THERE ARE THOUSANDS OF NON LUXURY GPU's, JUST LIKE THERE ARE ALWAYS A FEW DOZEN LUXURY GPU's.

    So your faux aghast smarmy idiot comment about I thought GPU's were commodities fits right in with the retard liar shortbus so stuffed to the brim with the clowns we have here.

    You're welcome, I'm certain that helped.
  • Ankarah - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link

    Could then you care to explain why any of those ultra enthusiasts would choose this card over the 690GTX, which seems to be faster overall?

    And let's leave the power consumption between the two out of this discussion - if you can drop a grand on your graphics card for your PC, then you can afford a big power supply too.
  • sherlockwing - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link

    You haven't seen the SLI benches yet.

    This card in SLI will perform better than GTX 690 in SLI due to bad scaling for Quad SLI.
  • sherlockwing - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link

    Correction: It will be better than GTX 690 SLI if you overclock the Titan to 1Ghz, 690 don't really have that much OC headroom.
  • CeriseCogburn - Saturday, February 23, 2013 - link

    did you say overclock ?

    " In our testing, NVIDIA’s GK110 core had no issue hitting a Boost Clock of 1162MHz but hit right into the Power Limit, despite it being set at 106%. Memory was also ready to overclock and hit a speed of 6676MHz. As you can see in the quick benchmarks below, this led to a performance increase of about 15%. "

    So, that's the 27mhz MAX the review here claims...LOL

    Yep, a 15% performance increase, or a lousy 27mhz, you decide.... amd fanboy fruiter, or real world overclocker...

    http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canu...
  • Alucard291 - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link

    Well as Ryan said in the article its "removed from the price curve" which in human language means: Its priced badly and is hoping to gain sales from publicity as opposed to quality.
  • Oxford Guy - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link

    Hence the "luxury product" meme.
  • trajan2448 - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link

    Learn about latencies and micro stuttering, driver issues, heat and noise. Almost 50% better in frame latencies than 7970. Crossfire,don't make me laugh. here's an analysis.
    http://www.pcper.com/reviews/G...
  • CeriseCogburn - Thursday, February 21, 2013 - link

    correcting that link for you again, that shows the PATHETIC amd crap videocard loser for what it is
    http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphics-Cards/NVIDIA...

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