ASUS EN9800GTX+ 512MB Dark Knight

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…

…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!