NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB: Upping The Ante

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 this past 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 review with a custom-recorded demo run taken in the "Catacombs" area checkpoint, at various resolutions without anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering enabled, and then with 4X AA and 16X aniso enabled concurrently.

FarCry has historically been somewhat of a strong suite for ATI graphics hardware, as is evident in the graph above. Without using any additional pixel processing, all of the graphics configurations we tested were essentially CPU bound, and the Radeon X1800 XT trails all of the NVIDIA cards by small margins. However, with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering enabled, the Radeon X1800 XT looks strong when compared to any other single card configuration. The Radeon X18000 XT was able to outrun the GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB by a couple of frames per second at 1600x1200 when AA and aniso were used, but at the lower resolution the GeForce came out ahead by a similar margin.

If we factor in the performance of the SLI configurations though, NVIDIA's platform is untouchable. A pair of 512Mb GeForce 7800 GTX cards is over 15% faster than a pair of 256MB cards, and remains CPU bound even when FarCry's resolution is ratcheted way up and anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering are used.