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Far Cry
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.
As you can see, not a huge lead here. I can explain this though. I've been telling you for many months now that this game is CPU limited and we need a faster CPU to make the GPU produce better scores.
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 affect the framerate.
Wowzers .. we are heavily CPU bound at all resolutions (we need an even faster CPU). The results are again taken with 4x Antialiasing and 8 levels of Anisotropic filtering enabled. The framerate is measured over an intensive shader rich timedemo with a custom Guru3D.com written configuration file with everything maxed out.
This is almost silly, we need more complex games to make the Crossfire rig sweat even a little.
X3 - Reunion
The makers of X Beyond the Frontier and X2 Egosoft bring you yet another space combat game X3. When you look at X3 you feel like you're right in the middle of a science - fiction movie. The game has stunning visual effects, which give some amazing views of the world where Julian Brenan (protagonist) belongs. Julian, who is the son of Kyle Brenan from X2, who helps Julian in his extraordinary journey in a galaxy far away from planet earth. X3 scores high on the graphics and visual aspects, which are of real high quality. The impressive space scenes are hard to miss. The ships are much more sleek and smarter then the ones in X2.You will find the visual effects to be spectacular. However, most of this action is restricted to the cockpit of the space ship and this tends to be a little disappointing, as you are involved in all the action only through the drivers seat.
X3: Reunion is mind-bogglingly beautiful. I got quite a bit of enjoyment out of simply looking at my surroundings while flying from one mission to another. Explosion effects and battle scenes also leave little to be desired as even the pickiest of gamers will simply drool over the graphics.
Shader model 3 is supported (and enabled).
From a graphics point of view this is one of the best looking games ever. The average framerate is based upon four large timedemo's which form the result. We enabled four levels of AA and sixteen levels of Anisotropic filtering here.
The high-end cards stay very close to each other. None the less, the X1900 Crossfire setup wins marginally here. I have not done SLi results just yet for this new title. Again I'm afraid we are running into a CPU bottleneck here which seems silly with a thousand dollar FX-57 CPU.
We'll likely overclock the system in the near future and do an article on CPU scaling versus Crossfire and SLi to see the effect on performance.
