FarCry Patch v1.2 - SM 3.0 Performance on the GeForce 6 Series

Name: FarCry Patch v1.2 - SM 3.0 Performance on the GeForce 6 Series - Page 8
Brand: FarCry

by Marco Chiappetta — Friday, July 02, 2004, 05:00 PM EDT

Benchmark Summary: When using the SM 3.0 path, the 12-pipe GeForce 6800 ($299) was able to outperform a 12-pipe Radeon X800 Pro ($399) in only two, lower-resolution tests with AA and Anisotropic filtering disabled. When AA and Aniso were enabled, the X800 Pro outpaced the 6800 across the board. The similarly priced GeForce 6800 GT ($399), however, beat the Radeon X800 Pro in all of the default tests, as well as when 4X AA was enabled. It was only when anti-aliasing and Anisotropic filtering were enabled concurrently that the X800 Pro was able to score a few victories over the GT.

The FarCry v1.2 patch is somewhat of a milestone for NVIDIA. When DirectX 9.0c "ships", FarCry, when patched to v1.2, will be the first readily available game to take advantage of the GeForce 6 series Shader Model 3.0 capabilities. And although image quality is generally unaffected by the SM 3.0 in FarCry, the performance gains associated with using the SM 3.0 path are significant. If the types of performance gains we've seen here today are typical, more game developers may begin to use SM 3.0 to give their projects a boost. If this happens quickly, NVIDIA's GeForce 6 series may overtake ATi's X800's in more and more games, putting NVIDIA in a much more comfortable position.

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Tags: GeForce, Patch, performance, rf, force, RMA, arc, IE, AR

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