ATI Radeon X1900 XTX And CrossFire: R580 Is Here

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, January 24, 2006, 08:00 AM EDT

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FarCry v1.33

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 last 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 article with a custom-recorded demo run taken in the "Catacombs" area checkpoint, at various resolutions without anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering enabled, and then again with 4X AA and 16X aniso enabled concurrently.

FarCry was essentially CPU bound in the lower resolution test, with all cards and configurations performing within a few frames per second of one another. Technically, NVIDIA had the edge in the default graphics configuration, but when anti-aliasing and aniso was used, ATI pulled ahead. Every card performed well though hovering around the 100 FPS mark. The same basically holds true at the higher resolution, but the performance deltas between the default tests and the tests with additional pixel processing were much larger. At the higher resolution, the Radeon X1900 XTX and XT are clearly the highest performers with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering enabled, besting NVIDIA's 512MB GeForce 7800 GTX by about 13%. A pair of 512MB GTXs running in SLI mode had a slight edge over an X1900 CrossFire configuration, but the difference is minimal and more a result of CPU limitation than a bottleneck in the graphics sub-system.