Sapphire Radeon HD 5550 Ultimate

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.

With the performance seen in MW2 and BiB, I couldn’t help but laugh as I was loading up Crysis Warhead. Any low-end truly croaks with this title, and this one is no exception. We finally broke the sub-10 FPS barrier!

In order to achieve what we found to be enjoyable gameplay, the only option was to shift all detail settings down to Minimum. Even at 1680×1050 with Mainstream was too tough for the card to handle, but Minimum fixed all that, and overall, it ran quite well.