Far Cry is certainly a bit more demanding on the Graphics processor than Half Life 2.  The Crytek game engine that powers the game is also one of the few on the market these days that can compete with the likes of Doom 3 and Half Life 2 in terms of visual splendor and impressive shader effects.

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 all the special effects turned on.  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.  Geometry instancing and normal map compression were enabled for these tests, but HDR rending was disabled.  The default pixel shader code path was used.

Things scale a bit more as we expected in this benchmark but the advantage definitely goes to the ATi based HIS X850 XT and X800 XL cards.  At 1024X768 it's impressive to see the X800 XL maintain a frame rate comfortably above 60 fps, even with 4X AA and 8X Aniso Filtering turned on.  At 1600X1200 with AA and AF things begin to drop into what we would consider the borderline range in terms of playable frame rates, with the exception of the HIS Radeon X850 XT.  It also interesting to see that the X800 XL still shows serious muscle here, besting even the GeForce 6800 Ultra at high res with AA and AF turned on.  At a suggested MSRP of $349 it's hard to beat the value the X800 XL brings to the table, time and time again either competing with or surpassing its competition in comparable architecture versus NVIDIA and for much less.  However, we all realize the historic supply issues that ATi has experienced with its newly released VPUs in the channel.  Here's hoping that ATi steps things up a bit because what good is a competitively priced card if you can't buy it at that competitive price or even find them available in retail?