Introduction

Often times when we incorporate a new benchmark, we like to examine the performance of a range of cards in that benchmark in greater detail than we may do in a product review. Additional detail settings may be run, and of course we’ll round up as many cards as possible in order to provide data for the largest audience time will allow. We figured our new Far Cry benchmark was a perfect opportunity for one of these articles.

Far Cry, in case you didn’t know, has been developed by CryTek. If you recall, it was CryTek who developed X-Isle: Dinosaur Island, which was one of the technology demos for NVIDIA’s GeForce3 launch. X-Isle utilized 1.x pixel and vertex shaders as well as bump-mapping to create a beautiful prehistoric environment and was actually the original working title for Far Cry (the name was changed to Far Cry in 2002).

9700 PRO AA disabled

9700 PRO 2xAA

9700 PRO 4xAA

Far Cry’s CryENGINE takes advantage of the latest hardware technologies. The engine utilizes 2.0 vertex and pixel shaders (and 3.0 shaders for GeForce 6800 once DirectX 9.0c is released) as well as supporting the 64-bit extensions found in AMD’s Athlon 64/Athlon 64 FX processors. The end result is a game with the most jaw-dropping graphics we’ve seen to date. (For those of you who are familiar with the early days of 3D, we’d definitely rate Far Cry as a GL Quake experience in terms of awe.)

Far Cry isn’t just a pretty face either, the game features team-based AI. Enemies will use the jungle’s vegetation for cover, and are quite responsive to the slightest noise. The game uses real world weapons ranging from a machete to a gatling-style minigun (perhaps the M61 Vulcan, which is used on all USAF and USN fighter aircraft).

9700 PRO AF disabled

9700 PRO 8xAF, note the grains of sand and waves

9700 PRO 16xAF

How we test

Normally when we create a custom demo for benchmarking, we hop on a server online and duke it out with fellow gamers over the Internet. For Far Cry however, this isn’t possible, as the game’s built-in recording feature doesn’t accurately reproduce events such as gun fire, enemies (or objects) being hit, or even the weapon you’re currently carrying during the recording! Therefore, to get around this limitation our Far Cry demo is based on an empty server where we merely walk through the level mp_monkeybay.

The demo starts at the top of the main platform where we then work our way down to the beach, cross the bridge, then work our way back to the other side of the beach, all while looking at various features within the map. Therefore our demo is still based on gameplay, although the action you’d normally encounter online isn’t present.

We’ve rounded up many of ATI’s recent DirectX 9 cards, including the RADEON 9500/9500 PRO, multiple flavors of the 9600 and 9800 line, RADEON 9700 PRO and RADEON 9800 XT, ten cards total. All cards were run in very high quality mode (the highest setting available in the game) with 2.0 and 1.1 shaders being used. In Part 1 of this article we’re focusing on ATI cards, while Part 2 will deal with NVIDIA DX9 hardware, 2.0 versus 1.1 shaders (with screenshots), and the performance improvements the 1.1 Far Cry patch brings.