ATI Radeon X1800 GTO

Performance Comparisons with FarCry v1.33 Details: http://www.farcry.ubi.com/

FarCry

If you've been on top of the gaming scene for some time, you probably know that FarCry was one of the most visually impressive games to be released on the PC last year. Courtesy of its proprietary engine, dubbed "CryEngine" by its developers, FarCry's game-play is enhanced by Polybump mapping, advanced environment physics, destructible terrain, dynamic lighting, motion-captured animation, and surround sound. Before titles such as Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 hit the scene, FarCry gave us a taste of what was to come in next-generation 3D gaming on the PC. We benchmarked the graphics cards in this article with a custom-recorded demo run taken in the "Catacombs" area checkpoint, at various resolutions without anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering enabled, and then again with 4X AA and 16X aniso enabled concurrently.

At a resolution of 1280x1024, we find that every card we tested was able to turn in respectable framerates. Somewhat surprisingly, the Radeon X1800 GTO found itself trailing the cheaper GeForce 7600GT by more than 10fps when no FSAA or AF was in use. Once 4x AA and 8x AF were enabled, the strength of the R520 architecture was finally illustrated as the roles were reversed and the GeForce 7600 GT was behind by 10fps. As we witnessed with 3DMark06, NVIDIA's GeForce 7900 GT was the leader of the pack by no small margin. In each case, this new GPU held a nearly 20fps advantage over ATI's new contender.

Raising the game's resolution to 1600x1200 yielded some slightly different results. Here, the more price-conscious GeForce 7600 GT lost its sizeable lead with no image quality enhancements enabled and the Radeon X1800 GTO was only a mere 3fps behind. Again, we found the GeForce 7900 GT doing a good job justifying its $50 premium over the X1800 GTO, by being nearly 40fps faster. Enabling FSAA and AF narrowed that margin significantly, although the overall pack order still had the GeForce 7900 GT taking top honors with the Radeon X1800 GTO taking second and the GeForce 7600 GT following in third.