Sapphire Radeon HD 5750

Like Call of Duty, Crysis is another series that doesn’t need much of an introduction. Thanks to the fact that almost any comments section for a PC performance-related article asks, “Can it run Crysis?”, even those who don’t play computer games no doubt know what Crysis is. When Crytek first released Far Cry, it delivered an incredible game engine with huge capabilities, and Crysis simply took things to the next level.

Although the sequel, Warhead, has been available for just about a year, it still manages to push the highest-end systems to their breaking-point. It wasn’t until this past January that we finally found a graphics solution to handle the game at 2560×1600 at its Enthusiast level, but even that was without AA! Something tells me Crysis will be de facto for GPU benchmarking for the next while.

Manual Run-through: Whenever we have a new game in-hand for benchmarking, we make every attempt to explore each level of the game to find out which is the most brutal towards our hardware. Ironically, after spending hours exploring this game’s levels, we found the first level in the game, “Ambush”, to be the hardest on the GPU, so we stuck with it for our testing. Our run starts from the beginning of the level and stops shortly after we reach the first bridge.

Here’s where our results get to be a bit strange. Because Crysis usually tends to favor ATI cards just a wee bit, I expected to see the HD 5750 surpass the GTS 250 here. These results confused me so much, that I looked around the web, and sure enough, the HD 5750 beat out the GTS 250 in every set of results I found. I can’t explain the oddity here, but given that our 3DMark Vantage scores lined-up with what we expected to see, it’s hard to understand.

If the HD 5750 lived up to my performance expectations, it would have been able to handle the game at 2560×1600 with no issue, but since it couldn’t, it fell behind the GTS 250 once again, and had to be pushed back to 1920×1080 with the Mainstream profile.