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 1.1.
 
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 antialising 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, HIS Radeon X700 achieved a performance similar to Leadtek GeForce 6600 GT AGP and it was 82.84% faster than Gigabyte GeForce FX 5950 Ultra.

HIS Radeon X700 was beaten by ATI Radeon 9800 XT, which was 12.84% faster, ATI Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition, which was 10.84% faster, ATI Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition, which was 10.82% faster, Sapphire Radeon X800 Pro, which was 9.78% faster and XFX GeForce 6800 Ultra, which was 5.40% faster.

At a resolution of 1280x1024 without any image quality enhancement, HIS Radeon X700 achieved a performance similar to Leadtek GeForce 6600 GT AGP and it was 146.97% faster than Gigabyte GeForce FX 5950 Ultra.

HIS Radeon X700 was beaten by Sapphire Radeon X800 Pro, which was 18.52% faster, ATI Radeon 9800 XT, which was 18.11% faster, ATI Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition, which was 17.85% faster, ATI Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition, which was 16.06% faster and XFX GeForce 6800 Ultra, which was 11.29% faster.

At a resolution of 1600x1200 without any image quality enhancement, HIS Radeon X700 was 149.04% faster than Gigabyte GeForce FX 5950 Ultra.

HIS Radeon X700 was beaten by ATI Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition, which was 65.73% faster, Sapphire Radeon X800 Pro, which was 65.58% faster, ATI Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition, which was 62.87% faster, XFX GeForce 6800 Ultra, which was 62.67% faster, ATI Radeon 9800 XT, which was 33.53% faster, and Leadtek GeForce 6600 GT AGP, which was 23,38% faster.

At a resolution of 1024x768 enabling image quality enhancements, HIS Radeon X700 achieved a performance similar to Gigabyte GeForce FX 5950 Ultra and it was beaten by ATI Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition, which was 146.32% faster, ATI Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition, which was 145.05% faster, XFX GeForce 6800 Ultra, which was 137.35% faster, Sapphire Radeon X800 Pro, which was 99.04% faster, ATI Radeon 9800 XT, which was 20.69% faster, and Leadtek GeForce 6600 GT AGP, which was 10.95% faster.

At a resolution of 1280x1024 enabling image quality enhancements, HIS Radeon X700 achieved a performance similar to Leadtek GeForce 6600 GT AGP and it was beaten by ATI Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition, which was 210.26% faster, XFX GeForce 6800 Ultra, which was 170.74% faster, ATI Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition, which was 170.17% faster, Sapphire Radeon X800 Pro, which was 97.86% faster, ATI Radeon 9800 XT, which was 18.56% faster, and Gigabyte GeForce FX 5950 Ultra, which was 5.33% faster.

At a resolution of 1600x1200 enabling image quality enhancements, HIS Radeon X700 was beaten by ATI Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition, which was 297.45% faster, XFX GeForce 6800 Ultra, which was 249.42% faster, ATI Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition, which was 211.81% faster, Sapphire Radeon X800 Pro, which was 131.41% faster, ATI Radeon 9800 XT, which was 46.28% faster, Gigabyte GeForce FX 5950 Ultra, which was 29.59% faster, and Leadtek GeForce 6600 GT AGP, which was 29.52% faster.