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 our cpu.

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 run the demo in are as follows: 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024 and 1600x1200. The first test was committed with the Anti Aliasing (AA) and Anisotropic Filtering (AF) features off. In the second test, we leveled up AA to 4x and AF to 8x.

Outstanding performance."The way it was meant to be played" fits exactly the way the card ran our Far Cry benchmark.

Far cry is the only game that, with an official patch, offers further support for new graphics effects. Starting with patch 1.3.1337, Ubisoft gave Far Cry a whole new look with the latest Nvidia cards, using only HDR (High Dynamic Range) lighting. Here are some screenshots showing how HDR lighting makes the game much more impressive.

Booth - No HDR	Booth - HDR 7
Elevator - No HDR	Elevator - HDR 7
Wall lights - No HDR	Wall lights - HDR 7

Of course, all this new eye candy comes at a price:

The drop is more than 50% as the lighting is very intensive for the graphics card to handle. Performance at 1600x1200 was sometimes jerky but when playing at 1280x1024, the 6800 GT GLH ran the benchmark without any problems.

To enable HDR lighting for your card, you need 3 things:

1) A latest generation Nvidia card (6800, 6600 etc)
2) Run the game using the -devmode switch added to the shortcut.
3) Open up the console using the tilde key (~), type "r_HDRrendering 7" and "r_HDRlevel 1".

There are 12 different types of HDR rendering you can set with r_HDRrendering and you can also set the amount of lighting using the r_HDRlevel command.