Far Cry

Like most first person shooters, Far Cry has built-in demo functionality. However, unlike most games, the recording only tracks the user's movements and leaves the bots to roam around using AI. In essence, when playing back a recorded demo in Far Cry, you are getting exact game-play performance but the user is "invisible" to the enemy and follows a recorded trail through the level. While this does a better job at evaluating the game's overall performance on your system, it stresses the CPU and memory as well as the graphics.

For our Far Cry benchmarking, we played back a recorded demo on the "Pier" map. In this map, the user leaps off of a cliff in a hang-glider and coasts through a valley gathering a great perspective of the game's vast landscape and lush tropical environment. The user also runs through the foliage down to the water-line. The demo was played back in a time-demo format which spits out the average FPS. For each test, the time-demo was run three times and the results were averaged.

Far Cry No AA / No AF
(Show All Graphs) (Collapse Graphs)

1280 x 1024

1600 x 1200

ATI Radeon X800 Pro

XFX GeForce 6800 GT

PowerColor Radeon 9800 XT

Leadtek WinFast A380 Ultra

59.97

61.31

54.72

53.80

0

(FPS)

111

 

 

1280 x 1024

1600 x 1200

ATI Radeon X800 Pro

XFX GeForce 6800 GT

PowerColor Radeon 9800 XT

Leadtek WinFast A380 Ultra

57.95

56.45

40.53

30.01

0

(FPS)

111

 

 

Here we see that the X800 Pro and 6800 GT perform very closely when AA and AF are disabled. With 4x AA and 8x AF enabled however, the X800 Pro pulls ahead. The X800 Pro provides the best overall gaming experience at 1280 x 1024 with 4x AA and 8x AF.