Coming out in 2008, Crysis Warhead is the oldest game in our test suite, but it's still very demanding compared to some of the other games we tested.  It's also the only game in the suite which uses DirectX 10.  Maxing out quality settings at the resolution of 1920x1080, only some of the video cards have a playable framerate.  The Radeon HD Double Black Diamond is one of those cards with the minimum framerate a little above 30fps.  It was able to edge out a victory against the last generation GeForce GTX 580.

When we drop from the enthusiast quality preset one step lower to gamer quality, Crysis Warhead is run well into playable framerate territory with the Double Black Diamond.  It still manages to maintain its slight lead over the GeForce GTX 580.

The built in benchmarking tool in HAWX 2 is basically a showcase of what DX11 tessellation can do.  The background scenery in the demo is a mountain range which was generated to have a more realistic look with the use of tessellation (whereas oddly enough, none of the airplanes look realistic).  There was some controversy with the HAWX 2 and it's implementation of tessellation around the time the demo was released, which caused big performance drops in Radeon GPUs.  With everything maxed, including enabling tessellation, the Radeon HD 7850 achieves high framerates.  However, its performance is well behind that of the GeForce GTX 580 in this game which has traditionally performed better with nVidia GPUs.

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