Far Cry is a game based on the new Shader 3.0 (DirectX 9.0c) model, which is used by GeForce 6 and 7 series from nVidia and Radeon X1000 series from ATI.
As we’ve done on other programs, we ran this game only at 1024x768. Since we were evaluating low-end video cards, we decided to not run our tests in higher resolutions, since rarely a user that buys a video card from this level will push resolutions above 1024x768 in 3D games.
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 ran this demo four times and made an arithmetical average with the obtained 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 antialising at 4x and anisotropic filtering at 8x manually at the video driver control panel. Some very low-end video chips (Volari 8300 and Intel i915G) don’t have antialiasing feature, so we were not able to benchmark them using this configuration.
ATI Radeon X1300 Pro was faster than all other video cards we included in our comparison, even GeForce 6600 and GeForce 6600 GT (this VGA probably would be faster than Radeon X1300 Pro in higher resolutions and higher image quality settings). It was 4.86% faster than GeForce 6600 GT 128 MB (nVidia), 7.98% faster than GeForce 6600 128 MB (Albatron), 36.36% faster than GeForce 6200 128 MB 128-bit (Leadtek), 112.91% faster than GeForce 6200 TC 64 MB 64-bit (XFX), 127.30% faster than Radeon X300 SE HM 128 MB 64-bit (PowerColor), 128.92% faster than Radeon X300 128 MB 128-bit (ATI), 176.82% faster than GeForce 6200 TC 16 MB 32-bit (Leadtek) and 236.40% faster than Volari 8300 128 MB (XGI).
Increasing the video image quality, GeForce 6600 GT was 41.89% faster than Radeon X1300 Pro, while the new chip from ATI was faster than all other video cards included in our comparison: it was 30.17% faster than GeForce 6600 128 MB (Albatron), 79.47% faster than GeForce 6200 128 MB 128-bit (Leadtek), 244.67% faster than Radeon X300 SE HM 128 MB 64-bit (PowerColor), 245.71% faster than Radeon X300 128 MB 128-bit (ATI), 269.98% faster than GeForce 6200 TC 64 MB 64-bit (XFX) and 944.51% faster than GeForce 6200 TC 16 MB 32-bit (Leadtek).
