Far Cry

FarCry used to be a rather demanding game in the past, but today even with FSAA 4x and aniso set to 16x, nearly all high-end graphics cards can achieve 50 – 60 fps here.

Due to high dependence of our demo from the Pier level, every high-end graphics board demonstrates equal results, unless the antialiasing and anisotropy are enabled.

Once eye-candy features are enabled, all the graphics cards except the RADEON X1800 XT begin to quickly drop their speed. Performance hit on the RADEON X1800 XT, by contrast, is negligible – thanks to extreme memory speed, it is 34% faster than the rival in the most complex case. The RADEON X1800 XL could match allegedly more powerful GeForce 7800 GTX in our case.

The general situation in the Research demo of the Far Cry game is pretty surprising: despite of the fact that both ATI and NVIDIA hardware works using Shader Model 3.0 code-path, NVIDIA’s products manage to grab the lead away from ATI.

Given that even the RADEON X850 XT PE succeeds in leaving the RADEON X1800 XL behind, we believe there is something going on with the drivers for the RADEON X1800-series, but as for now, NVIDIA’s execution of Shader Model 3.0 code-path in Far Cry seems to be more efficient compared to ATI’s.

The eye-candy mode changes the situation by putting the RADEON X1800 XT impressively ahead of the GeForce 7800 GTX due to tremendous memory clock-speeds. The model X1800 XL cannot beat the model 7800 GT, even despite of allegedly more efficient memory controller.