ATi Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition

Benchmarks & Comparisons With Far Cry DX9 Effects Galore.

Far Cry

If you've been on top of the gaming scene, you probably know that Far Cry is one of the most visually impressive games to be released on the PC to date.  Although Doom 3 and Half Life 2 have both arrived, Far Cry still looks great in comparison, especially with the new v1.3 patch installed.  Far Cry came along and 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 AA or Aniso Filtering enabled and then with 4X AA enabled along with 8X anisotropic filtering.

With the recently released v1.3 patch installed, performance in Far Cry has gotten much more competitive.  The new patch gives the CryTek engine the ability to take advantage of the PS 2.0b and PS 3.0 capabilities inherent to ATi's R4x0 and NVIDIA's NV4x series of GPUs, as well as enabling support for normal map compression, geometry instancing, and HDR (High-Dynamic Rage) rendering.  We configured the game to use the PS 2.0b code path on the Radeons and the PS 3.0 path on the GeForces.  Geometry instancing and normal map compression were enabled, HDR rendering was disabled, and all in-game graphical options were set to their maximum values.  With Far Cry configured this way, the new Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition was again able to outpace all comers at both resolutions in both test configurations.  At 1,024 x 768, the performance deltas were relatively small until we enabled 4X antialiasing and 8X anisotropic filtering, where the X850 pulled ahead of the GeForce 6800 Ultra by about 10.1%.  At 1,600 x 1,200, things got a little tighter, but the X850 was able to hold on to the lead by a couple of frames per second when AA and aniso were used.