NVIDIA's GeForce 7950 GX2 & Forceware Rel. 90

Name: NVIDIA's GeForce 7950 GX2 & Forceware Rel. 90 - Page 9
Brand: NVIDIA's

by Marco Chiappetta — Monday, June 05, 2006, 08:00 AM EDT

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 with a custom-recorded demo run taken in the "Catacombs" area checkpoint, at various resolutions with 4X AA and 16X aniso enabled concurrently.

All of the graphics cards we tested performed very well in our custom FarCry benchmark. What's interesting to note is that the GeForce 7950 GX2 and the GeForce 7900 GTX SLI and the Radeon X1900 XT CrossFire rigs were all essentially CPU bound at both resolutions. Only a couple of frames per second separate all of the dual-GPU configurations here. The single-GPU configurations, however, trailed by significant margins once we raised the resolution to 1600x1200. The increased fillrate, memory bandwidth, and shader performance offered by ATI's CrossFire and NVIDIA's SLI / GX2 dual-GPU technologies have a large impact on performance in graphically intense situations.

Tags: Nvidia, GeForce, X2, Forceware, force, 7950, id, 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