Benchmark: FarCry
Test Setup
With easily some of the most stunning graphics seen to date, FarCry was an obvious choice for a benchmarking title. For each run, all the image quality settings were maximized to put as much stress on the cards as possible. Furthermore, the water quality settings was set to “Ultra High” each time the resolution was changed as it would keep resetting to “Custom”. For our testing, we relied upon the latest 1.1 patch to ensure the highest compatibility and performance.
For each card, all settings were set to “Quality” mode with V-Sync disabled. Specifically on the NVIDIA cards, the option for Trilinear Optimizations was disabled to force “true” trilinear filtering.
UPDATE: For a sneak peek at the new FarCry mod using PS3.0, check out our news post.
At 1024*768, we see that this test comes out as a draw with each card performing relatively the same.
Once the resolution is increased to 1600*1200, we see that the graphics cards are suddenly faced with a considerable workload. As we have seen in the previous benchmarks, the GeForce 6800 Ultra thrives on these higher resolutions and walks away with a considerable framerate advantage over the competition.
As was the case at 1024*768 with the eye-candy disabled, turning on FSAA and AF fails to differentiate the performance of these cards from one another. For those who want to look closely, you’ll see that the GeForce 6800 Ultra does have the edge over the other cards here.
Cranking the resolution up to 1280*1024 with these enahnced image quality settings enabled, we see the GeForce 6800 Ultra pull away from the pack. More often than not, the new NVIDIA flagship card is 20fps or more ahead of the competition. Looking at the average framerate though, we realize that even the power of the GeForce 6800 Ultra is not enough to make gameplay in this demanding engine fluid at these incredibly high settings.
