Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 Vapor-X 2GB

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.

The extra brawn that is the pre-overclock wasn’t enough to help the card pass NVIDIA’s GTX 480, but it came very, very close, especially at 2560×1600.

For a first-person shooter, 30 FPS tends to be a minimum, and that’s really no exception here. But as there is such a nice improvement in detail from Mainstream to Gamer, we feel that sacrificing some extra framerates is worth it, as we still have a very playable game.