NVIDIA's GeForce 7800 GTX

Far Cry

Publisher: Ubisoft

Here, we are using the full retail version of Far Cry patched to version 1.31. We did a manual run through of a section of the Factory level, which is both indoors and outdoors - the majority of our manual run through is taken from the start of the level, which is all outdoors. We also played through a section of the Fort level to ensure that our settings were playable in other graphic-intensive environments.

Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering were controlled from inside the game, and thus we left the drivers set to "Application Controlled".

Far Cry was the first game to implement a High-Dynamic Range Lighting technique, based on the OpenEXR file format, allowing all video cards with an FP16 frame buffer and support for FP16 blending to make use of this new lighting technique. At the moment, this method of HDR is only supported by NVIDIA's hardware, but we fully expect ATI's upcoming hardware to have support for FP16 blending and FP16 frame buffers.

Our GeForce 7800 GTX SLI combination was capable of delivering a completely hitch-free gaming experience at the game's maximum details at 1600x1200 0xAA 8xAF with r_HDRRendering set to '5'. There are 13 different HDR techniques in Far Cry – some require more performance than others depending on how much additional light is being exposed. In this situation, we found HDR '5' to be the best combination of image quality and performance when using GeForce 7800 GTX SLI.

A single GeForce 7800 GTX was capable of running at the same r_HDRRendering setting, while we had to drop the resolution to 1280x1024 in order to attain an acceptable frame rate. This meant that a single GeForce 7800 GTX was able to play the game without hiccup at 1280x1024 0xAA 8xAF with r_HDRRendering set to '5'.

We found that GeForce 6800 Ultra SLI delivered a smooth frame rate at 1280x1024 0xAA 4xAF with r_HDRRendering set to '2' – this goes to show just how much NVIDIA have worked on improving the efficiency of the way that HDR is processed inside the pixel shader.

Finally, a single GeForce 6800 Ultra was playable at 1600x1200 0xAA 8xAF without HDR, while our Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition delivered a solid game experience at 1600x1200 2xAA 8xAF.

The gaming performance that we experienced with GeForce 7800 GTX was quite fantastic in Far Cry - we were able to play the game smoothly with HDR enabled at high resolution. It shows the efficiency improvements that NVIDIA have added to the architecture up pretty well.

We were able to attain a smooth frame rate at 1600x1200 with HDR when we used two geForce 7800 GTX's together in SLI, which was an added bonus to the already solid performance of a single GeForce 7800 GTX.