Thanks to Newegg for supplying the Sapphire X700 Pro 128MB for testing.

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. You may download the timedemo here.

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 (NoAA/NoAF)
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1024x768

1280x1024

PowerColor X600 XT 128MB

Sapphire X700 Pro 128MB

Leadtek 6600 GT 128MB

56.05

76.67

74.40

0

(FPS)

100

 

 

1024x768

1280x1024

PowerColor X600 XT 128MB

Sapphire X700 Pro 128MB

Leadtek 6600 GT 128MB

33.62

49.67

55.51

0

(FPS)

100

 

 

The X600 XT is behind the rest of the pack, as expected, but produces playable framerates up to 1280x1024 without AA or AF. Once again, don't even think about enabling AA or AF on the X600 XT (seeing a pattern here?). The X700 Pro and 6600 GT are pretty close again, with playable rates up to 1024x768 4xAA/8xAF.