Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 Vapor-X 2GB

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.

This particular title gave me issues during testing, so the results here may not be typical of what you’d see. In the rest of our games, you’ll see that the latest drivers from ATI ups the performance over older versions, but for some reason, Crysis Warhead for me would simply not function (game would crash upon entering a level) with either the Catalyst 9.3 or 9.4. For that reason, I had to fall back to 9.2.

So, with that, the performance isn’t too surprising, and it happens to be right on par (actually, a smidgen behind) with the 1GB version of the same card. Certainly not playable with the Gamer profile at anything above 1920×1200, and even that resolution is cutting it very close (similar to our CoD: WaW report).

Like our 1GB model of the card, and pretty much the rest of our line-up, moving to the Mainstream profile boosted our performance to a very playable level at 2560×1600. The game isn’t quite as clean looking with the Mainstream, but if you have a 30″ monitor, it’s going to look much better than 1920×1600 with Gamer.