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 1.2 build 1318. 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.

NVDIA's cards do not have Shader model 3 enabled. We show real-life performance. Neither DX9.0c  or the FarCry patch  have been released. In fact even if you have these two patches it still requires tweaking to get the codepath running. IMO this is not representable for the end user.

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

A few weeks ago we started working on another time-demo to test graphics cards. Right now, this new Far Cry timedemo in combo with the HiS card is the only card we tested it with. The new time-demo we made is a little more graphics' card dependant which scales the results better when the card is stressed to it's maximum. Speaking of maximum, every possible graphical enhancing setting is maxed out.

I went out on a limb for you guys and did a lot of IQ combo's so that you can determine what impact these setting have in terms of performance and to see what mode suits you the best:

Right then, let's have a look at the synthetic benchmarking with Aquamark.