Since it has been released Crysis is called considered to be a "graphics card killer” and innumerous reviews and benchmarks on the web tell the same about Warhead. At the weekend we wanted to know it for sure and took a closer look at the performance effect of the CPU. Therefore we didn't just check different clock speeds but also the effect of multiple cores.

Crysis Warhead: Test system ...
All benchmarks were made on a system with the following components: We took a Gigabyte X38-DQ6 motherboard, an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 and 2 x 2,048 MiByte DDR2 1066 RAM. This chassis was combined with a Geforce 8800 GTX (768 MiByte) and the popular Radeon HD 4870 (512 MiByte). The operating system is Windows XP x86 with Service Pack 3.

... and settings
The stick to Warhead's "Enthusiast” settings for our benchmarks - so we have the best available graphics quality without editing the configuration files. To shift the workload we run our benchmarks at 1,024 x 768 and 1,690 x 1,050 both without FSAA/AF and with default clock speeds of the graphics cards. We also ran an additional test at 800 x 600 with the graphics cards overclocked to their limits. This scenario is supposed to reveal, how much (and if at all) low-end graphics cards gain benefit of faster processors. All settings were tested with 1 to 4 CPU cores (forced via MSConfig).

CPU clock speeds (tested with 2 and 4 cores):

- 434 x 6 = 2,6 GHz
- 438 x 8 = 3,5 GHz

You can find the benchmark results on the next pages.