HIS Radeon X850XT IceQ II Turbo

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.


If we disregard the GeForce 7800 GTX, the HIS Radeon X850 XT is the top performer in this title, by a considerable margin. We were able to run at 1600x1200 2xAA 8xAF with maximum in-game details. Obviously the Radeon X850 XT does not support the method of HDR used in this title, so we could not enable that. We found that there was very little difference between the HIS Radeon X850 XT at its stock clock speeds and its enhanced 'Platinum Edition' clocks – again, we experienced no image quality improvements and a slight frame rate increase on both average and minimum frame rates that was not really all that noticeable in game.

We found that it was faster than the GeForce 6800 Ultra, which could only run at 1600x1200 0xAA 8xAF with maximum in-game details. Despite GeForce 6800 Ultra supporting the OpenEXR file format for Far Cry's HDR, we chose not to enable it because that would mean running at 1024x768 – a far from ideal resolution on a high-end video card. The 7800 GTX fared much better, being able to use HDR at 1280x1024 without any hitching whatsoever, allowing it to deliver a much greater level of image quality than is possible with both the Radeon X850 XT, X800 XL and GeForce 6800 Ultra.