Image Quality Comparison

Before we proceed to the benchmarks, let us perform a brief image quality comparison between ATI RADEON X800 XT and NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra using the latest patch and drivers.

We used 5 scenes from “Training”, “Pier”, “Catacombs”, “Archive” and “Volcano” levels, as shown below. Game quality settings were set to the maximum level, anisotropic and trilinear optimizations were enabled for NVIDIA-based graphics card.

The brief analysis proves that there are no substantial image quality differences between ATI RADEON X800 XT and NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra graphics chips. It means speed gains in the game were achieved by implementing more efficient shaders and other rendering mechanisms rather than by engaging image quality tradeoffs.

The only thing that is differently produced by ATI and NVIDIA graphics cards is shadows.

NVIDIA seems to have a driver bug that results in very rough shadows in the game. This is unlikely to affect performance seriously as shadows in FarCry hardly require any significant computing power, though, this is something negative we can tell about the new set of drivers.