The Games of Christmas '08: GPU Performance Part 1

Crysis: Warhead DX9 GPU Performance

To benchmark Warhead, we recorded a 5 minute timedemo on the Ice level which included ranged and hand to hand combat.

1680 X 1050



2560 X 1600


Even though Crytek billed Warhead as incorporating optimizations that the original game didn’t have, the results from both Nvidia and ATI are decidedly lackluster. Playable framerates are hard to come by but the HD 4870 X2 does an admirable job of delivering some pretty amazing performance all-around. The GTX 280 didn’t wow us either considering its performance cost it dearly in the cost per FPS category. What did catch my eye was the HD 4870 1GB which was able to not only deliver some impressive averages but really dominated in the minimum FPS department.

As for the HD 4850 vs 9800 GTX+ battle, neither was able to provide enough performance in any test but if you want to split hairs, the HD 4850 was the “clear” winner.