NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GS: AGP, Alive and Kicking

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 using the standard Regulator demo, at various resolutions without anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering enabled, and then again with 4X AA and 16X aniso enabled concurrently.

First up in our round of in-game benchmarking, is the widely popular Far Cry. The last thing you need when fighting mercs on a tropical island, is to have your frame rates drop to the floor. Fortunately, all of the cards tested here are able to handle this game at 1024x768, even with AA and AF turned up. The XFX GeForce 7800 GS takes the lead, but not by all that much. The CPU is what's holding us back here, but we'll see how things turn out once we up the resolution.

At a resolution of 1280x1024, and with 4x AA and 16x AF, we start to get an idea of how well the 7800 GS performs. The XFX 7800 GS is nearly 10FPS faster than the GeForce 6800 Ultra, and about 5FPS faster than the stock GeForce 7800 GS.