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 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.

Update - I've included some additional benchmarks with AF (Anisotropic filtering) & TRI (Trilinear) optimizations on and off at request.

No Opt - means no Optimisations are enabled.
Tri/AF Opt - means Trilinear and Anisotropic optimisations enabled, these are driver default settings.
Tri opt  On - Trilinear Optimization enabled / Anisotropic disabled

After a lot of requests we included Far Cry in the test-suite. As you where able to read above we had to do a few tricks to make the results constant between the manufacturers. Some explanations, neither ATI and NVIDIA offer true trilinear filtering at default settings. All cards thus 6800/x800 pro/x800 xt in the review have their optimized trilinear codepath enabled (default settings). Very comparable as both companies pretty much optimize the same thing, yet with a different approach.

NVIDIA allows you to enable 100% Trilinear filtering by using an option in the drivers called Disable Trilinear optimisation. ATI at this point does not offer that in it's drivers. There's a small hack for ATI available yet I'm not convinced that is a 100% valid hack. So at this point in time we can not offer you un-optimized trilinear results for ATI graphic's cards compared to NVIDIA. Same goed for an Anisotropic filtering optimization.

The AF Optimisation was active at defaults except where you see Tri Opt Off combo's as explained above in the benchmarks. I just did a quick recheck as this is something I will include into upcoming reviews and the difference with 16x AF enabled between the optimisation on/off is not even 10%. I really stared myself blind and could not tell a difference and you know how I feel about blowing up a screenshot 400% and then say .. hey look at that difference. If you can't see it and it's functional it is a legit optimization. Furthermore 8xAF means of course 8 levels of Anisotropic filtering, 16xAF is of course 16 levels. AA in the next benchmarks will refer to Antialiasing and 6800GT 401/1060 are the results of the card when overclocked.

When we compare both x800 Pro and 6800 GT then at default settings the GT is superior. When we enable 16 AF however, the X800 Pro has the advantage. We used newer 61.34 ForceWare drivers which clearly bumped up the performance for the 6800 Series bigtime when compared to previous beta drivers.

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