NVIDIA Forceware v77.7x: New SLI AA Modes & Mainstream SLI

Name: NVIDIA Forceware v77.7x: New SLI AA Modes & Mainstream SLI - Page 7
Brand: NVIDIA

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, July 19, 2005, 12:00 PM EDT

AA Performance: FarCry

Page 7: AA Performance: FarCry

Performance Comparisons with FarCry v1.31

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 is one of the most visually impressive games to be released for the PC. 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 disabled, and then with 4X, SLI 8X and SLI 16X AA and 16X aniso enabled concurrently.

RED=SLI 8X AA / TAN=SLI 16X AA

RED=SLI 8X AA / TAN=SLI 16X AA

RED=SLI 8X AA / TAN=SLI 16X AA

Performance in FarCry with SLI anti-aliasing enabled fell somewhere in between Doom 3 and Half Life 2. With SLI 8X and SLI 16X anti-aliasing enabled in FarCry, a pair of GeForce 7800 GTX cards performed well below the level of a single GTX with standard multi-sample 4X anti-aliasing enabled. At 1280x1024, FarCry was still very playable with SLI 8X anti-aliasing enabled, and the framerate remained over 30FPS with SLI 16X AA enabled. At 1600x1200, however, SLI 8X AA was still somewhat playable, but enabling SLI 16X AA pushed the framerate down into the low twenties.