Farcry v1.2

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 CryEngine offers.

A great advantage and strong point of 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 realistic 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 refferable benchmark to speak of.

- Benchmark Settings

I recorded my own demo with Farcry for benchmark purposes. For the demo I picked the Fort map and based 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 truly a stressful benchmark for VGA cards since we used the high quality settings for all tests. I was 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 at are as follows: 1024x768, 1280x1024 and 1600x1200. The first test was executed 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.

The low CPU issue shows itself here. As you can see, for the first 2 resolutions we have the same fps for the 6800 Ultra and the Radeon 9800. This of course is quite misguiding as it is due to the CPU that holds the card back. It's like driving a Hayabusa motorbike in a traffic jam.

Enabling the quality settings, things start to clear out. Even though the performance difference from the other cards is clearly visible, the fact that the same 40 fps is achieved at all resolutions shows that the card again is being held back.