I spent part of my weekend with Crysis: Warhead, Crytek's follow-up to Crysis, the most graphically sophisticated game yet made. And, like its precursor, Warhead is an eye-poppingly pretty game-assuming your PC can bend to the will of its highest graphical settings. My custom built computer isn't exactly a gaming slouch, but it can't touch this game on anything but medium settings and resolutions.
However, as luck would have it I happen to have a couple of high-end gaming rigs on loan at the moment: Alienware's $4,500 Area-51 m17x laptop and Dell's $6,000 XPS 730 H2C desktop. Both machines are advertised as representing the very pinnacle of gaming hardware in their particular categories. If they couldn't hack Warhead, then it seems unlikely any machine could.
I booted it up on the Dell first. This liquid-cooled behemoth sports dual 768 MB NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultras, 4 GB of Corsair Dominator DDR3 RAM overclocked to 1333 MHz, and a quad core Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 processor with a 12 MB cache. (It's a prototype that was configured back in June, which is when I originally reviewed it. Dell offers even more powerful hardware options now.)
I was quite pleased by the resulting experience. I ran Warhead with graphics set to a mix of "Enthusiast" and "Gamer" settings (the highest and second highest of the game's four available options for each visual modifier) and pegged the display output at a respectable 1600-by-1024. Water shimmered and rippled in satisfyingly realistic fashion, and the sunlight created beautiful, misty rays as it shone through the jungle foliage. It was extraordinarily immersive-just what one would expect from one of the most visually advanced games ever made.
Then I tried loading Warhead on Alienware's notebook. Not so impressive. I've watched the m17x chew up and spit out games like Call of Duty 4 and Bioshock, but when it came to Warhead I had to settle for "Minumum" and "Mainstream" graphics settings and an unspectacular 1280-by-720 resolution in order to get a playable frame rate.
To be fair, laptops-even the most powerful-simply can't compete with a tricked out desktop when it comes to gaming performance. What's more, the demo model I was sent wasn't configured with the most powerful hardware Alienware offers for the m17x-there are several speedier processors than the 2.5 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 that my unit came equipped with, and you can swap out the dual NVIDIA GeForce Go 9800M GT 512 MB graphics cards for a Quadro FX 3600M. Indeed, it's safe to say that a completely pimped out m17x (priced north of $6,000) would fare much better with Warhead.
But, when it comes down to it, I really shouldn't need to berate or defend the computers I use to evaluate a game. The fact that an unfeasibly expensive rig is required to play Warhead with all of its bells and whistles turned on is less damning of the hardware than the software-and a sad statement on the overall impracticality of the Crysis games.
I wrote it when I reviewed the original Crysis , but I'll type it again here: To the few who have machines capable of rendering Crysis: Warhead in all its visual splendour, go for it. You won't be disappointed by what you see and experience. Everyone else ought to hold off a couple of years until their hardware manages to catch up to the ridiculously high bar that Crytek has set with these games.