ASUS Radeon EAH5850

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.

If I were a bit more ambitious, I think I’d move Crysis results to the end of the review, because they’re so depressing. While CoD and CoJ delivered impressive FPS reports, Crysis never fails to dampen the mood by showing off sub-30 FPS results at the high-end resolution of 2560×1600. But, while not entirely desirable at the high-end, the game ran great at 1080p. The “Enthusiast” mode is still an elusive choice, however.

Make no mistake… the HD 5850 is one powerful card, but it’s met its match with Crysis Warhead. In order to achieve playable settings at 2560×1600, the profile had to be decreased to the still good-looking Mainstream. With that done, the game was smooth as better – totally enjoyable.