Benchmark Results: Crysis 2
When we organize by putting the longest bars first, the Radeon HD 7950 drops to the very bottom of our charts, behind even AMD’s own Radeon HD 6950.
Is the story really this bad for AMD in Crysis 2?
Actually, no. We knew from our Radeon HD 7970 launch coverage that this architecture does not handle DirectX 9-based apps particularly well. Whether that’s an inherent compromise or a lack of driver maturity will become more evident over time.
What is immediately apparent, though, is that switching into DirectX 11 mode, which hammers every other architecture, turns out to be a simple movement sideways for the Radeon HD 7970 and 7950. In fact, at 2560x1600, both boards perform better using DirectX 11.
Looking at the DirectX 11 numbers, we see the Radeon HD 7950 pull itself together, falling between the GeForce GTX 570 and 580. Although we know that DirectX 11 mode applies an unnecessarily extensive amount of geometry, we’d hesitate to blame the loss here to Crytek’s implementation of tessellation. After all, we saw in the HAWX 2 scaling numbers that this card is able to maintain more of its performance with tessellation applied than any competing product.
