Benchmarks - Far Cry

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 1.1. Secondly we made sure that the graphics cards were forced to run Shader Model 2 as a 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 were not consistent between different brands we can't use them in this part of the benchmark results.

Right then, let's have a look, the results above are as follows:

• 6800GT AGP8x - GeForce 6800 GT AGP 8x on 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 system 1 Gig DDR1 400 memory similar software on all systems.
• 6800GT PCI-E - GeForce 6800 GT on PCI Express 16x based system with Pentium 4 3.2 GHz and 1 Gig DDR2 533 memory.
• 6800GT AGP 3800+ GeForce 6800 GT AGP 8x on Athlon 64 3800+ system with DDR400 1 GHz memory
• 6800GT AGP 2.8 - GeForce 6800 GT AGP 8x on Pentium 4 2.8 GHz system with 1 GZ DDR400 memory.

What you need to look at directly are of course the differences in performance between 6800GT AGP8x and 6800GT PCI-E as they run on the same processor frequency. The PCI-Express has an advantage here though, newer mainboard 915P/G chipset and of course slightly faster memory will give it a small edge over the older 865PE chipset. But it'll give you a good idea of what you can expect performance wise.

Next to that throughout the reivew I added results from a slower and faster system (AGP8x though) to show what the GT can actually handle and what kind of effect a CPU can have on this particular graphics card.

Right then, for the following results we have enabled quality settings namely 4x Antialiasing and 8x levels of Anisotropic filtering.

BTW - It's impossible to play Far Cry without being completely blown away by the graphics; the game engine is THAT good.