Far Cry

There’s no sense in comparing the numbers we’ve got in this test because all the graphics cards, except for the GeForce 7900 GTX, have roughly the same speed. The GeForce 8800 GTX is obviously unable to reveal its potential, being limited by the capabilities of the CPU and platform.

This test mode is harder, yet it makes no big difference. Note that the Radeon X1950 XTX with its true 6x multisampling is almost as fast as the GeForce 8800 GTX with 8x MSAA. The GeForce 7950 GX2 performs well singly and in pair (we mean the GeForce 7950 Quad SLI system based on two such graphics cards), but the 8xS mode of the single GeForce 7900 GTX is again proved useless for a real-life application.

The GeForce 8800 GTX is somewhat slower than the Radeon X1950 XTX CrossFire, providing a comparable quality of antialiasing, but we shouldn’t forget that the new graphics card loses to the fastest multi-GPU platform built on last-generation cards. Anyway, either solution allows using 16xQ CSAA and 14x Super AA whereas the GeForce 7950 Quad SLI can hardly meet our performance requirements even in 1600x1200, although Far Cry is by far not the hardest 3D application today.

What we’ve said above is true for both Pier and Research maps. The single difference is that the GeForce 8800 GTX looks somewhat more confident in the latter case, outperforming the Radeon X1950 XTX CrossFire greatly in 8x FSAA mode and losing less in 14x/16x FSAA mode.