UPDATE: Added section with performance numbers for the "Eye-Candy" mode with full-scene antialiasing and anisotropic filtering activated. More comments in "Conclusion" section.

Introduction

The most-demanding first person shooter game currently available has not only made it to the top of gamers’ lists, but also has become the No.1 benchmark for hardware reviewers. Being the only title currently available that uses DirectX 9.0 in all its glory, the FarCry reserves a lot of headroom for its developers along with graphics processor makers to tweak the game’s settings and render paths in order to achieve maximum speed.

Early in July, 2004, Crytek and NVIDIA released a patch and a driver that enabled Shader Model 3.0 use in the FarCry game for performance acceleration purposes. However, Shader Model 3.0 if far not the only way to improve speed by using more advanced rendering techniques: apparently, Shader Model 2.0b that is supported by ATI’s hardware is also capable of boosting the speed up, according to ATI, who will shortly release a new driver version that enables the capability.

Today we have a chance to evaluate performance of ATI’s latest RADEON X800-series visual processing units with additional speed increase provided by well-organized programming of pixel shaders along with geometry pipeline