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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 build 1318. Secondly we made sure that the graphics card are forced to run Shader Model 2 as fair base of comparison. 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.

NVIDIA's cards do have Shader Model 3 enabled if available (ie the 6800 series). We show real-life performance. The FarCry full patch has not been released.

The generic consensus for the benchmarks in today's article is simple... you will not see a lot of comparative material. Why? First of all we tested the graphics cards on a completely new platform with the new 3.6 GHz Pentium 4 chip. Secondly, that platform is PCI-Express based and there are not many PCI-Express cards around to be honest. I actually have three in the lab.

So what we did in todays review is compare it with a product that is about as expensive, the GeForce 5750PCX, which basically is the GeForce FX 5700 with PCI-Express. In all honesty, performance of that card was quite dramatic compared to the HiS x600, yet likely due to drivers. So comparisons will be a tad weird today. I say focus on the x600 results, one thing you know for sure, it's not CPU limited.

I'd like to add one more footnote towards the benchmarks, we _always_ test games at the best quality settings available, and with this mid-end product in combination with the new DX9 titles we added to our test suite the results can look very low. Basically, in this mid end segment you will have to lower image quality (IQ) a bit to get more decent results. It's good to have options isn't it?

The score above for example shows 22 frames per second at 1024x768, but that was with the best IQ available. If we set the IQ towards low then the game to be honest still looks pretty sweet, there is a very noticeable difference though; yet then we are at 90 FPS in that same resolution. So you see... there is a wide performance range depending on what image quality settings you choose. I am a high-end freak, therefore I always want the best in-game IQ and accept no less.

Another side note, 545/400 ultra quality is of course the card in overclocked status showing off the test results. 545 is the core frequency in MHz and 400 is the memory frequency in MHz (800 MHz DDR).

Right then, let's have a look at benchmarking with Unreal Tournament 2004.