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 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 new demo from the start of the Rebellion stage. We chose an indoor scene in order to avoid being CPU bound under any circumstances. This will produce slightly higher results since it is also less GPU intensive but we can't afford being stuck at 40-50 fps because of CPU limitations.

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 at are the following: 800x600,1024x768, 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.

Can you believe that? Excellent performance! We'd never expect ATI's latest low-end chipset to be able to handle such a graphically intense game as Far Cry with all its eye candy settings enabled. The result is really stunning. We couldn't believe our eyes so we checked our settings one more time to make sure we had set everything correctly. Far Cry is actually playable under 1024x768! Of course, don't expect the framerate to be above 25 at all times but it's not something you can't sacrifice for a higher resolution.

Enabling 4x Anti-aliasing and 8x Anisotropic Filtering halved the framerates we got when we had these set to off. The results are once again suprizingly high for our card. We thought the X300 was made for office applications and we were totally wrong.