DX11: Far Cry 3

Before We Start

We'll be comparing the GTX Titan with GeForce GTX 680 and Radeon HD 7970 GHz mostly for obvious reasons. We'll also add the GTX 690, which isn't entirely fair really as single GPU's should really be compared with single GPU solutions only.  Honestly, your focus should be GTX 680 versus GTX Titan.

DX11: Far Cry 3

Shoot first, ask questions later. In Far Cry 3, players step into the shoes of Jason Brody, a man alone at the edge of the world, stranded on a mysterious tropical island —  players will slash, sneak and shoot their way across the island in a world that has lost all sense of morality. As Jason Brody, you'll notice that the visual quality of the game is pretty darn good, but very heavy on the GPU alright.

System requirements will vary greatly depending the graphics settings, but a modest PC will be required to run the game at medium settings or better. Far Cry is built on the Dunia game engine, similar to the prequals but it certainly has been updated and is DirectX 11 compatible.

Far Cry 3 basically has four quality modes: LOW, MEDIUM, HIGH and ULTRA. Next to that you'll have settings and preferences you can choose from. The game however is VERY taxing on the GPU at times game at even HIGH quality settings. Our settings:

• Very High-quality DX11 mode
• 2x MSAA (Anti-aliasing)
• 16x AF (Anisotropic Filtering). 

For comparative reasons you should be focussing at 2560x1600 as that is the resuiltion where cards like these get more GPU bound. 

Far Cry 3 is pretty harsh with Very High image quality settings and MSAA enabled. But obviously no challenge for the Titan, even at 2560x1600 which quite honestly is over 4 Mpixels being rendered.

Now at the requests of you guys mentioning that we should be using faster processors in our default test system (and us all the time stating it doesn't make much difference). We'll be adding the performance difference of two platforms today.

Our default test system uses a Core i7 965X @ 3.8 GHz, this processor might be a little dated sure, but despite that it performs at Core i7 2600K/3770K performance as it's all the same Intel Nehalem base architecture with roughly the same clock frequencies.

A lot of you guys think that a 1100 USD processor like the 3960X will make a huge difference, and that's just not the case unless you are into breaking 3DMark records which weighs CPU performance into the equation. So in each benchmark chart today we'll add the results of a Core i7 3960X overclocked towards 4600 MHz on all cores on an X79 platform.

The OS for both platforms is a drive image clone of the default test system, expect for Intel chipset driver. So the OS, GPU, games/patches, etc are 100% the same. So yes, at 1920x1200 that is a whopping 3 FPS difference.