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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 1.3. 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.
Antialiasing results were not consistent between different brands, so we can't use them in this part of the benchmark results.
Nice performance!
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 results with 4x Antialiasing and 8 levels of Anisotropic filtering enabled.
When we enable 4xAA and 8xAF we'll notice that the game is enjoyable up-to a resolution of 1600x1200 with the x850's on any platform, you'll drool. That CPU limitation is huge though.
3DMark 03 Professional
3DMark 05 Business Edition
The latest in the 3DMark benchmark series built by Futuremark Corporation (formerly known as MadOnion.com). More than 5 million benchmark results have been submitted to Futuremarks Online ResultBrowser database. It has become a point of great prestige to be the holder of the highest 3DMark score. A compelling, easy-to-use interface has made 3DMark very popular among game enthusiasts. Futuremarks latest benchmark, 3DMark03, continues this tradition by providing a Microsoft DirectX 9 benchmark.
The introduction of DirectX 9 and new hardware shader technologies puts a lot of power in the hands of game developers. Increasingly realistic 3D games will be available over the next year and a half. The use of 3D graphics will become more accessible to other applications areas and even operating systems. In this new environment, 3DMark03 will serve as a tool for benchmarking 3D graphics.
This benchmark is not based on any game. Please remember this, never buy a graphics card based solely on the 3DMark score. I'm not bashing the 3D Mark suite here, it's good software but definitely not the sole basis for you to make an informed decision on to buy a graphics card. Especially after what happened in 2003.
Let's have a look at 3DMark 03 and 05 scores.
I have to admit, the importance of these results can be discussed in many way and varieties, yet according to one of our polls what you want to see are the scores and the scores are simply fantastic. Default is the standard 1024x768 reference test run from FutureMark with all options set to default. We also have a 3DMark05 results for you, very respectable performance. 3Dmark is designed in a way the exclude the CPU in the score calculation. As you can see PCI-Express has a small benefit (really small though)