Sapphire Radeon X800 XT - PCI Express

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.  Far Cry gives us a taste of what is 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 and 8X aniso enabled together.

Before dissecting our FarCry v1.3 performance results, we should explain exactly how they were run.  All of the cards were tested with all of the in-game graphical options set to their absolute maximum values.  The ATi powered cards were tested using the pixel shader 2.0b code path, but the GeForce 6800 GT was tested using the pixel shader 3.0 path.  High Dynamic range lighting was disabled, but geometry instancing and normal map compression were enabled. These configurations give NVIDIA's and ATi's video cards the ability to run the FarCry with the best image quality, while taking advantage of each architecture's strengths.

As you can see, all of 16-pipeline cards performed similarly in all of the test configurations using our custom FarCry timedemo.  The Radeon X800 XT powered cards did hold onto slight leads at 1024x768 when AA and aniso were enabled, and at 1600x1200 in both test configurations, but the margins of victory were not huge.  Had we gotten our hands on a GeForce 6800 Ultra, which is the truly fair comparison, the results would likely have been even tighter.