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 the HardwareOC Far Cry Benchmark 1.8 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 1.4 - Low	FPS	Difference
Core 2 Extreme X6800 (2.93 GHz)	151.09	7.59%
Core 2 Extreme QX6700 (2.66 GHz)	143.46	2.16%
Core 2 Duo E6700 (2.66 GHz)	141.18	0.53%
Core 2 Duo E6750 (2.66 GHz)	140.43
Pentium 4 550 (3.4 GHz)	65.01	116.01%

On Far Cry with no image quality settings enabled once again Core 2 Duo E6750 achieved the same performance level of Core 2 Duo E6700.

Far Cry 1.4 - High	FPS	Difference
Core 2 Duo E6700 (2.66 GHz)	77.48	0.51%
Core 2 Extreme QX6700 (2.66 GHz)	77.45	0.47%
Core 2 Extreme X6800 (2.93 GHz)	77.25	0.21%
Core 2 Duo E6750 (2.66 GHz)	77.09
Pentium 4 550 (3.4 GHz)	63.61	121.19%

When we maxed out image quality settings all Core 2 CPUs achieved the same performance level, indicating that when we max out the video quality settings is the video card that limits the maximum performance you can achieve.