Sapphire Ultimate X1600 Pro and X1600 XT

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 in 2004. 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 using the standard Regulator demo, at various resolutions without anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering enabled, and then again with 4X AA and 8X aniso enabled concurrently.

Far Cry will be our first indication of the performance we can expect out of these two cards in a gaming scenario. The X1600 XT comes in slightly ahead of Nvidia's GeForce 6600GT, however that's without any degree of Anti-Aliasing or Anisotropic filtering enabled. Once we up the image quality using 4x AA and 8x AF, the X1600 XT still manages to hold the top spot. The X1600 Pro puts up a respectable score, but our levels of AA and AF are a bit to much for the card, as an average of 45FPS can be a bit slow to some gamers.

Going to a higher resolution yields similar results. The X1600 XT remains at the top, and an average framerate of 58.37FPS will provide a decent experience for a card in the X1600 XT's price range. The 6600 GT falls behind a considerable amount when AA and AF are applied. As you can see from the X1600 Pro's numbers, high resolution gaming isn't its strong point.