Radeon X800 XL Roundup

FarCry
Publisher: Ubisoft

Image Quality:

Here, we are using the full retail version of FarCry 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.

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

All video cards used the same advanced in-game settings, with all fields set to their maximum available setting. The three Radeon X800 XL's were capable of delivering a smooth gaming experience at 1280x1024 with 2xAA 8xAF, while the reference GeForce 6800 GT delivered a smooth gaming experience at 1280x1024 with 0xAA 8xAF.

The lighting on the roof of the Factory is still not quite right on the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT - there is still a lot of room for improvement there, as the lighting is still over exposed by quite a considerable margin. ATI's implementation is much better, as it is actually showing details of the glass on the roof, rather than just showing a mass of light as seen on the GeForce 6800 GT. This is something that NVIDIA need to work on - we pointed it out a long time ago now, and the issue still remains unfixed.

Performance:

We were more than impressed with the gaming experience that the Radeon X800 XL delivered in FarCry. Thanks to the improvements made in Catalyst 5.2, the Radeon X800 XL delivered a considerably better gaming experience than the GeForce 6800 GT. The average frame rate was considerably higher, while the minimum frame rate was an acceptable 26 frames per second. The fact that the best-playable image quality was higher, and the lighting on the roof of the Factory is generally better means that the Radeon X800 XL delivers the better experience in the title thanks to its superior pixel shader prowess.