Highend CPU's vs High End Graphics cards

If you haven't played the demo or the game, well shame on you! Far Cry's story centers on Jack Carver, who has put a mysterious past behind him in favor of a less stressful life chartering boats in the South Pacific... or so he thinks. After delivering a female journalist to an uncharted island, Jack's boat is attacked and he subsequently finds himself stranded against a group of mercenaries, at which point his adventure begins. Graphically Far Cry is amazing; the action takes place in a huge, brightly colored environment with dense jungle style shrubbery, peacefully quiet beaches and large indoor areas. The excellent shadow effects simply bring the game to life with reflections on walls and even on your own weapons as you creep through the trees. It’s like something straight out of a movie, helped along by the lighting and tight, crisp textures. 
 

For Far Cry we did things a bit different then normal. First off, the game has been patched towards version 1.1 build 1256. Secondly we made sure that the graphics cards are forced to run Shader Model 2 as fair base of comparison. Next to that we are using our own Guru3D.com constructed timedemo to prevent driver cheats.

The results (frames per second) that you see below are a lot lower then in normal conditions as we modified configuration settings and make it as rough as it can get on the graphics card. All in all, at this time and moment, this is one of the best tests we can offer you to benchmark DirectX 9 compatible graphics cards.

As Antialiasing results where not consistent between different brands we can't use them in the part of the benchmark results.It's impossible to play Far Cry without being completely blown away by the graphics; the game engine is THAT good.

Now with Far Cry we see something REALLY interesting. When you look at the Pentium 4 2.8 GHz test you can see the 6800 Ultra and even GeForce 6800 GT beat the x800 XT in Far Cry. As the previous benchmark already showed, the x800 XT is very CPU dependant. On the 3800+ the x800 XT became the fastest thing available and is beating the GT easily in 1600x1200. The difference towards the 6800 Ultra is neglectable though.

Let's have a look at synthetic benchmarking with Aquamark.