ATI’s Radeon HD 5670 – DirectX 11 for $100

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.

These results aren’t too much of a surprise, given that Crysis is one of the most gluttonous games on the market. Even at 1680×1050, the performance was tar-like. Given that, what’s our best playable?

Simply downgrading the Gamer profile to Mainstream made all the difference in the world, enabling us to game on both versions of the card at 1080p with 35 FPS on average. The 20 minimum FPS seems a tad low, but as you can see, the FPS in this title gets low on any card, and it’s really not all too noticeable during gameplay. Warhead is one of the few games where 20 FPS is actually playable, so anything towards the 30 FPS and up is great.