Palit Radeon HD 4870 Sonic Dual Edition

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.

Palit’s overclocked HD 4870 has no trouble beating out the stock-clocked version, although the differences are minor. For Crysis to be enjoyable, the game should deliver at least 30 FPS, which we came very close to hitting at 1920×1200 with this card.

Although the Gamer profile delivers some sharp looking graphics, shifting to Mainstream doubled the output of our HD 4870 Sonic and allowed us to run the game at 2560×1600 with a comfortable 34 FPS on average The only GPU to date that’s capable of running that resolution along with the Gamer setting is ATI’s HD 4870 X2. Using two HD 4870s in Crossfire mode would offer similar results.