Far Cry is a heavy game based on the Shader 3.0 (DirectX 9.0c) programming model. We’ve updated the game to version 1.4. To measure the performance we run four times the demo created by German magazine PC Games Hardware (PCGH) and the results presented below are an arithmetic average of the collected data. We used HardwareOC Far Cry Benchmark 1.3.1 utility to help us collecting the data.

We ran this game in two scenarios, both at 1600x1200. The first one, which we called “low”, was with no anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering set to one and maximum details. The second one, which we called “high”, was with 8x anti-aliasing, 16x anisotropic filtering and ultra details. The results below are given in frames per second.

Far Cry seems not to use the extra CPUs brought by Core 2 Extreme QX6700. Here the dual-core CPU with the highest clock rate achieved the best performance: Core 2 Extreme X6800 was 4.51% faster than the reviewed CPU, which achieved the same performance level as Core 2 Duo E6700, as they both run at the same clock rate. The reviewed CPU was 46.73% faster than Athlon 64 X2 5000+, 114.92% faster than Pentium 4 3.4 GHz and 124.97% faster than Pentium 4 3.2 GHz.

Even though Far Cry runs faster on dual-core CPUs, this isn’t true with quad-core CPUs. Here Core 2 Extreme X6800 was once again faster as it runs at a higher clock rate – it was 4.89% faster than Core 2 Extreme QX6700. The reviewed CPU was 3.03% slower than Core 2 Duo E6700 and 36.16% faster than Athlon 64 X2 5000+, 105.88% faster than Pentium 4 3.4 GHz and 155.03% faster than Pentium 4 3.2 GHz under our “high” configuration.