Far Cry SLI Performance: X8 vs X16 PCIe
Far Cry (Direct X)
The new Far Cry 1.3 patch finally brings the features that the 1.2 patch was supposed to give us. This includes support for SM3.0 for the NVIDIA 6800 and 6600 line of cards as well as the SM2.0b that ATI has enabled in their latest drivers. The result is increased performance across both lines of graphics cards. Also included in this patch is support for HDR lighting (High Dynamic Range), though it wasn’t enabled by default, so our tests don’t include it yet.
On Far Cry 1.3 we are using manual run throughs of Far Cry as well on the Regulator level using God Mode enabled with the DEVMODE cheat to get repeatable results.
We set the in game quality settings as high as they would go, as you can see in the shot below.
At the 1600×1200 resolution we have a mixed bag where either motherboard wins one test by just fractions of a frame; basically no differences here between the two chipsets. Again at 2048×1536 we do see some slight performance changes up to about 5.5% with AA and AF enabled.