ATI Radeon HD 4890 & NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275

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.

Although ATI’s offerings tend to run Crysis better than NVIDIA, the extra juice of the GTX 275 once again put it ahead by a fair margin. But despite that, both cards share one similar trait… neither can handle the game at 2560×1600 on the gamer profile. So let’s see how things change when the Mainstream profile is used instead:

Here, the GTX 275 shines even brighter, not only surpassing the GTX 280 by a few extra FPS, but also coming close to the GTX 285. The HD 4890 also further proves its superiority over the HD 4870, but falls about 11 FPS short of the GTX 275.