Benchmarks: Very High Performance
The very high quality settings are much kinder on graphics cards. Please note we have dropped the multi-GPU Radeon HD 6990 and GeForce GTX 590 for these lower quality tests.
We were surprised to see the GeForce GTX 480 performing better than the GTX 580 with these settings. The cards were using different driver sets but by all accounts, the GTX 580 was using the newer, better optimized driver. This is certainly an interesting and unexpected result. The GeForce GTX 570 was faster than the GTX 470, though only by 2fps.
The Radeon based graphics cards again suffer, delivering considerably less performance than its GeForce counterparts. With an average of 75fps at 1680x1050, the Radeon HD 6970 delivered playable performance. In fact, every card that we tested here provided acceptable performance, as even the dated Radeon HD 4890 averaged 49fps.
Some of the cards start to sweat when running Crysis 2 at 1920x1200, namely budget products like the Radeon HD 4890 and Radeon HD 5830. The Radeon HD 6850 averaged 44fps and the GeForce GTX 460 managed 45fps and at this resolution it seems gamers using an AMD graphics card would want at least an HD 5850 or preferably the newer HD 6870.
While the GeForce GTX 460 struggled with 45fps, the older GeForce GTX 285 sailed along with an average of 53fps. The old GeForce was just 5fps lower than the Radeon HD 5970.
At 2560x1600 the GeForce GTX 580 matches the performance of the older GTX 480 with an average of 54fps. The GeForce GTX 470 averaged 42fps while the Radeon HD 6950 dropped to 39fps. Beyond this, the performance started to become noticeably choppy.