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Far Cry
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. Its 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 to version 1.3. Secondly where possible we made sure that the graphics cards were forced to run Shader Model 3.0 if possible. 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.

With that being said, nice performance. We always go for the highest possible image quality during our tests. So our regular testing uses a personalized configuration file. The Far Cry scores you can see here are a little lower then you'll have at home, as we enable all possible graphics settings from the game engine. This goes for things like maximum texture sizes to looking at water and actually seeing sand banks underneath the water surface. So that's like the highest game setting available plus a few additions from our side and that does effect the framerate.

From day one we've been shouting from the top of our lungs that Far Cry is a severely CPU limited game. So a faster processors should make a difference.

We do see a small gain for the FX-60 yet it's relatively small.

Unreal Tournament 2004

Added into our wide benchmark suite is Unreal Tournament 2004. The developers of UT2004 didn't want to split hairs with this game. It is still using the same engine and the majority of gameplay elements will be very familiar to players of the 2003 version. If you hated the first game, you'll probably hate this.

Sorry, but that's how it is. This large-scale, vehicle-focused game concentrates and focuses the action so that 12 players can have as much fun as 32. It includes several different gameplay modes including Onslaught, where each team has a power core that they need to protect. Between the teams' power cores are a number of smaller power nodes scattered across the map.

Buggies, hovercraft, tanks, trucks, space fighters, air fighters all feature prominently in Unreal Tournament 2004, and huge maps have been made to accommodate them.

What we customized for Unreal Tournament 2004 was the configuration, which is now set at the highest possible image quality. Next to that we recorded a really ridiculously-intensive-on-the-system time demo. The results then are compiled to an average, which is you average framerate. Again with default settings the framerate on your home machine would be somewhat higher as we go for the best possible settings available.

I've not been using UT2004 for a while now in our graphics cards reviews as this game has to be one of the titles with the biggest CPU bottleneck ever. Since we're testing CPU's today, well I figured let's have a look and see if we get a performance difference. It's obvious that's the case. There's massive CPU limitation though and UT simply does nothing with dual-core technology. I was surprized though that the FX60 beats the FX57 by a small margin.