Introduction

X800 XT 4xAA/8xAF

GeForce 6800 GT 4xAA/8xAF SM3.0

GeForce 6800 GT 4xAA/8xAF SM 2.0

CryTek has certainly come a long way since the company was first founded five years ago. The company’s first claim to real fame came in 2001 with their X-Isle: Dinosaur Island technology demo. In case you don’t remember, X-Isle was one of the DirectX 8 technology demos NVIDIA displayed with their GeForce 3 GPU, the world’s first graphics accelerator to sport hardware pixel and vertex shaders.

Since then the company has continued to push the state-of-the-art, quietly working on their own game engine, CryENGINE, which they planned to feature in their upcoming game which also featured the same working title: X-Isle: Dinosaur Island (the name was later changed to Far Cry in 2002) and license their CryENGINE to other game developers.

GeForce 6800 GT 4xAA/8xAF SM2.0

GeForce 6800 GT 4xAA/8xAF SM3.0

X800 XT 4xAA/8xAF

CryENGINE supports 2.0, and now 3.0 pixel and vertex shaders, rag doll physics, AMD-64, and an advanced team-based AI system; basically everything you’d want in a modern game engine.

GeForce 6800 GT 4xAA/8xAF SM2.0

GeForce 6800 GT 4xAA/8xAF SM3.0

But fortunately Far Cry didn’t turn out like other games that have been transformed from technology demos to shipping titles that were light on gameplay such as Incoming or DroneZ; Far Cry has a good storyline and compelling gameplay. When combined with the game’s excellent graphics, you’ve got a AAA title that has consistently been one of the top-selling PC games since it was released. We wouldn’t have written two 3D Performance articles featuring it if it were just another average first-person shooter.

GeForce 6800 GT 4xAA/8xAF SM2.0

GeForce 6800 GT 4xAA/8xAF SM3.0

X800 XT 4xAA/8xAF

After publishing the 3rd installment in this series on Friday, which examines Far Cry’s performance with the new 3.0 pixel and vertex shaders added in Far Cry 1.2, we were given the opportunity to speak with Cevat Yerli, President and CEO of CryTek and one of the founders of the company. We were curious about CryTek’s future plans for shader model 3.0, and other topics such as high dynamic range lighting (HDR), AMD-64 support, and ATI’s recently announced 3Dc technology, which provides 3D compression for normal maps. Let’s see what Cevat had to say!