GECUBE X800 XL 512MB SilenCool

Far Cry

Publisher: Ubisoft

Here, we are using the full retail version of Far Cry patched to version 1.31. We did a manual run through of a section of the Factory level, which is both indoors and outdoors - the majority of our manual run through is taken from the start of the level, which is all outdoors. We also played through a section of the Fort level to ensure that our settings were playable in other graphic-intensive environments.

It was the first game to implement a High-Dynamic Range Lighting technique, based on the OpenEXR file format, allowing all video cards with an FP16 frame buffer and support for FP16 blending to make use of this new lighting technique. At the moment, this method of HDR is only supported by NVIDIA's hardware, but we fully expect ATI's upcoming hardware to have support for FP16 blending and FP16 frame buffers.

Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering were controlled from inside the game, and thus we left the drivers set to "Application Controlled".

Below is a table of the best-playable settings that we found best for each video card configuration. In this title, we found that 25 to 30 frames per second minimum and a target of 45 frames per second (or higher) for the average frame rate in our manual run through. We found that this delivered a smooth and fluid gaming experience across the rest of the title, which were slightly less graphic intense than our manual run through.

We tested various portions of Far Cry only to find much the same story as with Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory - there were no benefits from adding an additional 256MB frame buffer to the Radeon X800 XL. We found that the GECUBE X800 XL 512MB was actually slightly slower than the Club-3D X800 XL 256MB by similar margins to what we had already seen in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory.

The GeForce 6800 GT has typically played second fiddle to the Radeon X800 XL in Far Cry, but the Release 75 driver seems to have delivered some additional performance, allowing us to improve the gaming experience in this title. Up until now, we have found that the GeForce 6800 GT was 'best playable' at 1280x1024 0xAA 8xAF, but the new drivers allowed us to apply 2xAA to the scene, while still achieving smooth game play. In fact, we found that the GeForce 6800 GT was now faster than the Radeon X800 XL in this title.