MSI FX5950 Ultra - Page 10

Far Cry

You are Jack Carver running your own boat charter business in beautiful Micronesia. With a past best left behind you, you'll be focusing on your present assignment: escorting an ambitious journalist named Valerie Cortez to the Island of Cabatu. It seems like a piece of cake, but you'll soon learn: paradise can be hell.

Farcry is an awesome First Person Shooter (FPS) based on a last generation 3D engine named CryEngine. Real-time editing, bump-mapping, static lights, network system, integrated physics system, shaders, shadows and a dynamic music system are just some of the state of-the-art features that the CryEngine offers.

A great advantage and strong point of the CryEngine is its physics system which supports character inverse kinematics, vehicles, rigid bodies, liquid, rag doll, cloth and body effects. All physics seem to be very realistic and you never get bored when facing enemies, since character models have multiple animations that blend in very realistic ways.

With an integrated shader system and a massive terrain which maximizes the viewing distance to 2km, these features make Farcry a perfect action game and also a referable benchmark to speak of.

- Benchmark Settings

We made our own demo with Farcry for benchmarking the VGA cards. For the demo we picked the Fort map and positioned the character on the top of the mountain where the whole island can been viewed at an unbelievable distance of about 2 kilometers. It's a really stressing benchmark for VGA cards since we used the high quality settings for all tests. We were careful not to use many bots because the advanced AI system of the game consumes a lot of CPU power.

The latest patch (1.2) was used for our tests which updates the game's graphics engine to use the Shader model 3.0. Unfortunately, this is supported for the 6800 series only.

The resolutions we ran the demo under are the following: 1024x768, 1280x1024 and 1600x1200. The first test was conducted with Anti Aliasing (AA) and Anisotropic Filtering (AF) features off. In the second test, we upped the AA level to 4x and AF to 8x. Keep in mind that this test is the most stressing of our whole game benchmarks series.

With the 1.2 version of Farcry, the 3D engine has been updated and supports the latest shader model 3.0 giving an even better visual perception in the breathtaking natural enviroment of the game.

MSI's FX5950 Ultra performs satisfactorily, ensuring that you get to enjoy this wonderful game with all its optical delites enabled, which wouldn't happen with an FX5900XT or older card.

First-class performance from the X800. On the other hand, playing with the FX5950U while having Anti-Aliasing at 4x and Anisotropic Filtering at 8x, gaming is too hard or even impossible. It can't keep the FPS counter from dropping below 25fps which is a little disappointing.