EVGA GeForce GTS 250 Superclocked

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.

Once again, the GTS 250 performed as we expected it to, but neither it nor the 9800 GTX+ could handle the Gamer profile too well in resolutions other than 1680×1050. For higher resolutions, that had to be dropped to Mainstream, as we’ll see below:

With the Mainstream profile selected, we get slightly better performance than what we saw at 1680×1050 with the Gamer profile. Luckily enough, the Mainstream profile still looks fantastic, and for it to run so well on both the GTS 250 and 9800 GTX+ is great. Cheap gaming doesn’t have to feel cheap, that’s for sure.