Conclusion

With Shader Model 2.0b render path available now in a commercial product and functioning flawlessly ATI Technologies sends a clear message to gamers: excellent performance the RADEON X800 XT and the RADEON X800 PRO deliver now can be improved in future. Like with the case of the Shader Model 3.0 performance advantage provided today is not really huge, however, future titles that use more per-pixel lighting as well as geometry with higher complexity are unlikely to turn into something that the RADEON X800-series cannot bite.

Even though ATI considerably improved performance of the RADEON X800-series graphics cards in FarCry’s “Pure Mode”, NVIDIA’s GeForce 6800 Ultra still can claim performance leadership here, as in quite a lot of cases speed delivered by the GeForce 6800 Ultra is a bit higher compared to the rivalling RADEON X800 XT.

The same situation is effective for a bit less expensive graphics options – the GeForce 6800 GT and the RADEON X800 PRO – 16 pixel pipelines definitely help the former to beat the latter in quite a lot of cases.

Benchmarks in “Eye-Candy” mode revealed nothing new: overwhelming advantage of the RADEON X800 XT over all the other graphics cards in FarCry became even more indisputable because of moderate performance boost achieved as a result of  more efficient rendering paths. Nevertheless, the boost is not enough to drive the RADEON X800 PRO to the leading position among $399 graphics cards in FarCry.

It is important to point out that ATI’s RADEON X800 XT and PRO graphics cards handle extreme geometry load better compared to NVIDIA’s GeForce 6800 Ultra and GT, which may mean that from this point ATI’s visual processing units have higher future-proof than NVIDIA’s latest graphics processing units do.

Additionally, ATI’s RADEON X800 XT traditionally calculates complex pixel shaders faster than everything else available today. Unfortunately, the RADEON X800 PRO still lags behind the competing GeForce 6800 GT product, whereas the RADEON 9800 XT does not seem to be a really strong rival for the GeForce 6800, at least, in FarCry.

In spite of expectations, the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra did not gain any performance boosts with the commercial 1.2 patch, which means that the whole GeForce FX family of products cannot be recommended for FarCry as they are not going to deliver solid performance with premier image quality, the main peculiarity of the game.

To sum everything up, it looks like both ATI and NVIDIA have some performance reserves with their latest families of graphics chips. In the following 6-9 months until the new breed of graphics processors emerges, we are not only going to see a fierce battle between ATI’s RADEON X800 and NVIDIA’s GeForce 6 architecture, but probably are also going to witness the competition between Shader Model 2.0b and Shader Model 3.0 render paths in terms of performance and possibly quality.