by Rob Williams on October 21, 2008 in Graphics & Displays
Need a new mid-range GPU for under $200? NVIDIA’s 9800 GTX+ is a good model to keep in mind, and ASUS’ Dark Knight card in particular proves to be one well-worth considering. The card offers great gaming performance for the cash, even handling certain games at 2560×1600 with ease, has a sweet-looking cooler, and best of all, is priced-right.
As PC enthusiasts, we tend to be drawn to games that offer spectacular graphics… titles that help reaffirm your belief that shelling out lots of cash for that high-end monitor and PC was well worth it. But it’s rare when a game comes along that is so visually-demanding, it’s unable to run fully maxed out on even the highest-end systems on the market. In the case of the original Crysis, it’s easy to see that’s what Crytek was going for.
Funny enough, even though Crysis was released close to a year ago, the game today still has difficulty running at 2560×1600 with full detail settings – and that’s even with overlooking the use of anti-aliasing! Luckily, Warhead is better optimized and will run smoother on almost any GPU, despite looking just as gorgeous as its predecessor, as you can see in the screenshot below.

The game includes four basic profiles to help you adjust the settings based on how good your system is. These include Entry, Mainstream, Gamer and Enthusiast – the latter of which is for the biggest of systems out there, unless you have a sweet graphics card and are only running 1680×1050. We run our tests at the Gamer setting as it’s very demanding on any current GPU and is a proper baseline of the level of detail that hardcore gamers would demand from the game.



ASUS’ 9800 GTX+ scaled well within our expectations here, but neither of our three resolutions delivered great gaming performance using the Gamer profile… it’s just too demanding. For Crysis to be truly enjoyable, it should be played with at least 30FPS, and even our 1680×1050 setting couldn’t hit that mark…
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Palit HD 4870 X2 2GB
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2560×1600, Gamer, 0xAA
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31.382 FPS
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Palit 9800 GX2 1GB
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2560×1600, Mainstream, 0xAA
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50.550 FPS
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Palit GTX 280 1GB
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2560×1600, Mainstream, 0xAA
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46.038 FPS
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ASUS 9800 GTX+ 512MB
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2560×1600, Mainstream, 0xAA
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34.319 FPS
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Palit HD 4870 512MB
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2560×1600, Mainstream, 0xAA
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32.973 FPS
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ASUS 9800 GTX 512MB
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2560×1600, Mainstream, 0xAA
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30.840 FPS
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ASUS HD 4850 512MB
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2560×1600, Mainstream, 0xAA
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26.530 FPS
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Gigabyte 9600 GT 512MB
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1920×1200, Mainstream, 0xAA
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31.979 FPS
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…but move Gamer down to Mainstream and the story changes dramatically. With this $~175 GPU, Crysis becomes playable at 2560×1600, and it’s a gorgeous experience. Hard to be upset about that!