Sapphire Toxic Radeon X700 Pro 128

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.  Although Doom 3 and Half Life 2 have both arrived, Far Cry still looks great in comparison, especially with the new v1.3 patch installed and some special effects turned on.  Far Cry came along and 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 AA or Aniso Filtering enabled and then with 4X AA enabled along with 8X anisotropic filtering.

FarCry proved to be a turning point in the benchmarking of the two X700 Pro cards.  With newer, more demanding games, the need for frame buffer memory becomes much more apparent.  At 1024x768, the variance in scores was still close, but with AA and Anisotropic filtering turned on, the gap started to get wider.  Once we increase the resolution to 1280x1024, both cards dropped 25 FPS with the No AA tests.  With the 4XAA/8X Aniso test, each card took an additional performance hit, although the benefits of more memory became more obvious.  The Sapphire Toxic Radeon X700 Pro 128 dropped an additional 10 FPS as compared to the 256MB X700 Pro comparison card.