Farcry

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 as 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 believable ways.

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

- Benchmark Settings

We made are own demo with Farcry for benchmarking the VGA cards. For the demo we picked the Fort map and based the character on the top of the mountain where the whole island can been viewed in an unbelievable distance of about 2kilometers. It's really a stressful 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 much CPU power.

The resolutions we run the demo on are the following: 1024x768, 1280x1024 and 1600x1200. The first test was committed with Anti Aliasing (AA) and Anisotropic Filtering (AF) features off. In the second test we leveled up AA at 4x and AF at 8x. Keep in mind that this test is the most stressful of our whole game benchmarks series.

Even at the 1600x1200 resolution the Exair R9800 XT is on top. The 9800 Pro model comes next and the GeForce models follows. A bug was encountered on the 1024x768 resolution with the GeForce series. Some textures had some other irritating colors as well as some particles occurred. We hope that an update of the game will fix that problem.

With the AA and AF settings on, the R9800 XT continuous its lead. However we were disappointed by the results of the GeForce VGA cards showing only 13-16 fps in 1024x768 and 1280x1024 resolutions. Keep in mind though that the game's engine has great requirements. Also all stages include a great deal of textures and particles (trees, bushes) as you can see from the screenshot. Imagine processing those textures with Anisotropic Filtering at 4x as we did. Of course a very strong GPU is needed if you have the funny idea to enable AA and AF.

- Painkiller

You play as Daniel Garner, a seemingly regular guy who has just been killed in a horrific car accident. Trapped in a dark and unwelcoming world between heaven and hell, you struggle to uncover the reasons why you've been denied entry into heaven. Awaiting your purification, you must fight through an endless number of demon soldiers as you attempt to stop an imminent unholy war.

If I was told to describe the game in a few words, I would just say "action in its all magnificence". Painkiller it's a FPS, but totally different from other of its kind like Farcry. You see in Painkiller you don't have to use any stealth or tactical abilities. You only shoot and run. An interesting feature of the game is that always you will be outnumbered and surrounded by hordes of enemies. Definitely a pure action game.

Pinkiller's 3D engine, named PAIN Engine, puts out an unbelievably high polygon count, while adding increased texture quality and the latest lighting and shadowing techniques, including soft shadows, DOT3 bump mapping, water reflections, glass simulation, volumetric light and fog, and more.

The game features 24 single-player levels, each one made by an average 350,000 polygons. The game boss monsters are massive made of 8000+ polygons and 2x2048x2048 textures. Enemies also have advanced bump-mapping and lighting models including specular lighting.

- Benchmarking Settings

To test the VGA cards on Painkiller, we recorder a time demo on the Psycho deathmatch stage. We used a multiplayer stage since this was the only way to record a time demo. After this we grabbed the average FPS on the following resolutions: 1024x768, 1280x1024 and 1600x1200. The first test was committed with Anti Aliasing (AA) and Anisotropic Filtering (AF) features off. In the second test we leveled up AA at 4x and AF at 8x.

Many frames for all resolutions. At 1600x1200 things start to clear out. With an average of 75 fps, Exair's R9800 XT is first, Sapphire's R9800 Pro second, and with almost identical fps the GeForce cards follow.

Same results with Anti Aliasing and Anisotropic filtering on. Again Sapphire's Pro model is as good as the XT, on the 1024x768 resolution. A minor drop of fps follows on the other 2 resolutions resulting 41 fps at 1600x1200. Not bad at all having in mind the AA & AF high quality settings are on. Till now Farcry and Painkiller indicated the same thing with similar fps.