Testbeds and Methods

Well, the time has come to investigate performance impact the new FarCry features bring. For that we had two systems: for AGP and PCI Express graphics cards.

Testbed 1:

• AMD Athlon 64 4000+ CPU (2.40GHz, 1MB L2 cache);
• ABIT KV8 Pro mainboard;
• OCZ PC-3200 Platinum EB DDR SDRAM (2x512MB, CL2.5-3-2-8);
• Samsung SpinPoint SP1213C HDD (Serial ATA-150, 8MB buffer);
• Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 sound card.

Testbed 2:

• Intel Pentium 4 560 CPU (Socket 775, 3.60GHz, 1MB L2 cache);
• Intel Desktop Board D925CXC;
• 1GB DDR2 PC2-4300 (533MHz) SDRAM (Micron Technology, 2x512MB);
• Samsung SpinPoint SP0812C HDD (Serial ATA-150, 8MB buffer);
• Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 sound card.

Software:

• Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP2, DirectX 9.0c;
• ATI CATALYST 4.10;
• NVIDIA ForceWare 66.81.

As usually, we set graphics quality to equal level: the RADEON and the GeForce hardware produced equal image quality. As usually, we used five demos recorded on “Pier”, “Regulator”, “Research”, “Training” and “Volcano” levels.