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 2X 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.

With the first round of tests, the Leadtek card posted a very playable 62.61 FPS.  When we added 2XAA and 8X Anisotropic filtering to the mix, the score dropped to 36.21 FPS.  At 1024x768, Anisotropic filtering and Anti-aliasing was stressful on the card, but 23.47 FPS was worth attempting.  In all benchmark rounds, Intel's integrated solution wasn't capable of running Far Cry at any reasonable rate whatsoever.