Far Cry is a game based on the new Shader 3.0 (DirectX 9.0c) programming model available on series 6 and 7 from nVidia and series X1000 from ATI graphics chips. We’ve updated the game to version 1.3.
 
As we’ve done on other programs, we ran this game at three resolutions, 1024x768x32, 1280x1024x32 and 1600x1200x32. This game allows several image quality levels and we’ve done our benchmarking on two levels, low and very high. To measure the performance we used the demo created by German magazine PC Games Hardware (PCGH), available at http://www.3dcenter.org/downloads/farcry-pcgh-vga.php. We run this demo four times and made an arithmetical average with the results. This average is the result presented in our graphs.

This game has a very important detail in its image quality configuration. Antialiasing, instead of being configured by numbers (1x, 2x, 4x or 6x) is configured as low, medium or high. The problem is that on nVidia chips both medium and high mean 4x, while on ATI chips medium means 2x and high means 6x, making the comparison between ATI and nVidia chips completely unfair. Because of that we configured antialiasing at 4x and anisotropic filtering at 8x manually at the video driver control panel.

For further details on how to measure 3D performance with Far Cry, read our tutorial on this subject.

At a resolution of 1024x768 without any image quality enhancement, Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition from ATI was 5.14% faster than GeForce 6800 Ultra from XFX, 6.9% faster than GeForce 6800 Ultra from nVidia, 12.12% faster than GeForce 6600 GT AGP from nVidia, 13.07% faster than GeForce 6600 GT AGP from Leadtek and 102.62% faster than GeForce FX 5950 Ultra from Gigabyte.

Radeon 9800 XT, Radeon X800 Pro from Gigabyte, Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition and Radeon X800 Pro from Sapphire achieved similar performance to Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition from ATI.

At a resolution of 1280x1024 without any image quality enhancement, Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition from ATI was 4.29% faster than GeForce 6800 Ultra from XFX, 5.46% faster than GeForce 6800 Ultra from nVidia, 12.51% faster than GeForce 6600 GT AGP from nVidia, 12.70% faster than GeForce 6600 GT AGP from Leadtek and 186.63% faster than GeForce FX 5950 Ultra from Gigabyte.

Radeon X800 Pro from Sapphire, Radeon X800 Pro from Gigabyte, Radeon 9800 XT and Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition achieved similar performance to Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition from ATI.

At a resolution of 1600x1200 without any image quality enhancement, Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition from ATI was 4.41% faster than GeForce 6800 Ultra from nVidia, 21.97% faster than Radeon 9800 XT from ATI, 29.81% faster than GeForce 6600 GT AGP from nVidia, 32.00% faster than GeForce 6600 GT AGP from Leadtek and 305.60% faster than GeForce FX 5950 Ultra from Gigabyte.

Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition, Radeon X800 Pro from Sapphire, Radeon X800 Pro from Gigabyte and GeForce 6800 Ultra from XFX achieved similar performance to Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition from ATI.

At a resolution of 1024x768 enabling image quality enhancements, Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition from ATI was 3.78% faster than GeForce 6800 Ultra from XFX, 7.65% faster than GeForce 6800 Ultra from nVidia, 23.31% faster than Radeon X800 Pro from Gigabyte, 23.75% faster than Radeon X800 Pro from Sapphire, 102.62% faster than GeForce 6600 GT AGP from nVidia, 104.09% faster than Radeon 9800 XT from ATI, 122,01% faster than GeForce 6600 GT AGP from Leadtek and 148.94% faster than GeForce FX 5950 Ultra from Gigabyte.

Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition achieved similar performance to Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition from ATI.

At a resolution of 1280x1024 enabling image quality enhancements, Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition from ATI was faster than all the other cards tested: it was 14.60% faster than GeForce 6800 Ultra from XFX, 14.84% faster than Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition from ATI, 22.52% faster than GeForce 6800 Ultra from nVidia, 56.81% faster than Radeon X800 Pro from Sapphire, 60.78% faster than Radeon X800 Pro from Gigabyte, 158.46% faster than GeForce 6600 GT AGP from nVidia, 161.69% faster than Radeon 9800 XT from ATI, 194.57% faster than GeForce FX 5950 Ultra from Gigabyte and 203.37% faster than GeForce 6600 GT AGP from Leadtek.

At a resolution of 1600x1200 enabling image quality enhancements, Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition from ATI was also faster than all the other cards tested: it was 13.75% faster than GeForce 6800 Ultra from XFX, 21.18% faster than GeForce 6800 Ultra from nVidia, 27.47% faster than Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition from ATI, 67.48% faster than Radeon X800 Pro from Gigabyte, 71.75% faster than Radeon X800 Pro from Sapphire, 171.70% faster than Radeon 9800 XT from ATI, 194.28% faster than GeForce 6600 GT AGP from nVidia, 206.69% faster than GeForce FX 5950 Ultra from Gigabyte and 206.87% faster than GeForce 6600 GT AGP from Leadtek.