HIS X850XT IceQII Turbo and Platinum Series VIVO 256MB AGP

by Jeff Bouton — Monday, June 06, 2005, 01:00 PM EDT

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Benchmarks & Comparisons With Far Cry

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 and some special effects turned on. 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. Geometry instancing and normal map compression were enabled for these tests, but HDR rending was disabled. The default pixel shader code path was used.

At 1024x768, all three cards were in a tight formation, with the V9999 managing to eke out a better score than the X850XTs. This can be considered well within any normal variations one might expect, especially with CPU limitation being a factor. This was evident once we applied AA and Aniso and then increased the resolution to 1600x1200. At 1600x1200, the pattern looked more normal, with the X850XT PE taking lead with the Turbo trailing by 3-4FPS. The V9999 GeForce 6800 took the biggest hit in the end, barely able to compete with 4XAA/8X Aniso at 1600x1200.