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Far Cry
If you haven't played the demo or the game, well shame on you! Far Cry's story centers on Jack Carver, who has put a mysterious past behind him in favor of a less stressful life chartering boats in the South Pacific... or so he thinks. After delivering a female journalist to an uncharted island, Jack's boat is attacked and he subsequently finds himself stranded against a group of mercenaries, at which point his adventure begins. Graphically Far Cry is amazing; the action takes place in a huge, brightly colored environment with dense jungle style shrubbery, peacefully quiet beaches and large indoor areas. The excellent shadow effects simply bring the game to life with reflections on walls and even on your own weapons as you creep through the trees. Its like something straight out of a movie, helped along by the lighting and tight, crisp textures.  

For Far Cry we did things a bit different then normal. First off, the game has been patched to version 1.2. Secondly where possible we made sure that the graphics cards were forced to run Shader Model 3.0 if possible. Next to that we are using our own Guru3D.com constructed timedemo to prevent driver cheats.

The results (frames per second) that you see below are a lot lower then in normal conditions as we modified configuration settings and make it as rough as it can get on the graphics card. All in all, at this time and moment, this is one of the best tests we can offer you to benchmark DirectX 9 compatible graphics cards.

As Antialiasing results were not consistent between different brands, so we can't use them in this part of the benchmark results.

So who know's the answer to this question: Why is the single GPU mode faster compared to the Dual GPU's activated in 1024x768 ?

The answer is CPU limitation and utilization. At that resolution the CPU is limited and while the graphics card(s) want to go faster the CPU can't calculate the actual frame and present it to the graphics card driver. So if the graphics card driver needs more CPU time to loadbalance between the two GPU's that will have an adverse effect on the overall framerate. You can see the difference is of course absolutely minimal, but this behaviour is what you'll notice with any CPU limited game. Dual GPU's just require a little more CPU dependancy.

We always go for the highest possible image quality during our tests. So our regular testing uses a personalized configuration file. The Far Cry scores you can see here are a little lower then you'll have at home, as we enable all possible graphics settings from the game engine. This goes for things like maximum texture sizes to looking at water and actually seeing sand banks underneath the water surface. So that's like the highest game setting available plus a few additions from our side and that does effect the framerate. The additional AA and AF tests is the average framerate measured over an intensive shader rich timedemo, also with that custom Guru3D.com written configuration file.

Below are the resutls with 4x Anti Aliasing and 8 levels of Anisotropic filtering enabled.

But what a wonderful experience it is to play Far Cry, you'll be completely blown away by the graphics and it's very playable on any modern graphics card. When we enable 4xAA and 8xAF we'll notice that the game is enjoyable up-to a resolution of 1024x768x32.

Far Cry did not take this SLI card very well. I can't explain it, it might be a driver bug. The increase in higher resolutions is marginal. Ah well, can't win them all.