Updated: Crysis 2 performance review of the final version of the game
25 graphics cards + CPUs Tested

This year looks to be packed with highly anticipated titles that will arrive to the PC. Crysis 2 is no doubt one of those games, and one in particular that has lived in our minds considering that the original game (2007) to this very day can put a mid-range machine to crawl.

As much as we admire developers' efforts to make newly released games accessible to a majority of PC gamers, Crytek's ambition to push the graphics envelope was confirmed last year when they claimed Crysis 2 would have "the best graphics you've ever seen". Soon after we got word that Crysis 2 would be made graphically superior on the PC versus its console counterparts, which was great news as we worried that Crytek may not remain loyal to their PC fans.

Crysis 2 is slated for release this March 22, however as it is of public knowledge, an early incomplete build of the game was leaked to Torrent sites last week. So, before we get started let's get a few things straight:

1) Our testing is based on the leaked, unfinished build of Crysis 2. Our intention with this article is to provide an early look to the game's GPU and overall system requirements. Of course, we were keen to see how the game runs on certain hardware given how demanding the original title was.

2) We don't believe this leak can be called a final representation of the game that will ship next month. It's obvious further optimizations will be made as we encountered bugs and had to recur to a few tricks to circumvent crashing to the desktop.

3) Ever since we played the original Far Cry, we became huge fans and supporters of Crytek's work. We encourage all readers who planned to buy the game to hold off and wait for the finished version, rather than spoiling what will surely be one of the best games of 2011.

With that out of the way and keeping in mind that this "beta" build of the game is still missing numerous features, we have run a brief set of tests comparing AMD and Nvidia graphics cards. We expect Crysis 2 performance to vary from now to the time the game is actually released, so please only accept this article as a rough guide.