ATI Radeon X1800 XT CrossFire Evaluation

Name: ATI Radeon X1800 XT CrossFire Evaluation - Page 6
Brand: ATI

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, December 20, 2005, 08:00 AM EDT

Performance Comparisons with FarCry v1.33

Details: http://www.farcry.ubi.com/

FarCry

If you've been on top of the gaming scene for some time, you probably know that FarCry was one of the most visually impressive games to be released on the PC this past year. Courtesy of its proprietary engine, dubbed "CryEngine" by its developers, FarCry's game-play is enhanced by Polybump mapping, advanced environment physics, destructible terrain, dynamic lighting, motion-captured animation, and surround sound. Before titles such as Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 hit the scene, FarCry gave us a taste of what was to come in next-generation 3D Gaming on the PC. We benchmarked the graphics cards in this review with a custom-recorded demo run taken in the "Catacombs" area checkpoint, at various resolutions without anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering enabled, and then with 4X AA and 16X aniso enabled concurrently.

FarCry proved to be one of CrossFire's strong points. The Radeon X1800 XT CrossFire configuration ran right alongside the dual-512MB GeForce 7800 GTX SLI configuration in every test, and surpassed NVIDIA's best in a couple of tests as well. The same basically rang true for the Radeon X1800 XL CrossFire rig, which performed on par with a pair of 256MB GeForce 7800 GTX cards running in SLI mode. Although FarCry still looks good with its huge outdoor environments and lush graphics, it's no longer one of the more demanding benchmarks in our test suite.

Tags: ATI, Radeon, Fire, CrossFire, SSF, Evaluation, x1, OS, ATI Radeon, OSS, XT, Lua, 180

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com