AOpen Aeolus 6800Ultra SLI mode
12. 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 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
For this game we recorded a custom demo from the start of the Rebellion stage. We chose an indoor scene in order to avoid getting the CPU-bound effect. This will result in slightly higher results since it is also less GPU intensive, but we can't afford being stuck at 40-50 fps because of our CPU.
The latest patch (1.3) was used for our tests which updates the game's graphics engine to use the 3.0 Shader model. This option is only supported for the 6800 series.
The resolutions we ran the demo under are the following: 800x600,1024x768, 1280x1024 and 1600x1200.
Same story here. No card could compete with the Aeolus cards. It should be noted than in SLI mode, there is only a small decrease in fps as we move to the higher resolutions, unlike the ATI card that reported a 60fps drop. Even with two 6600GTs, there is still a drop of only 30fps.
With AA and AF enabled, the ATI card has a chance for "revenge". Considering the cost of two 6800Ultras and the cost of a single X850XT, 12fps difference at 1600x1200 is really not enough. But again, first place belongs to AOpen's Aeolus.