Leadtek Duo PX6600GT TDH Extreme

Far Cry

Publisher: Ubisoft

We used the full retail version of Far Cry patched to version 1.32. 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.

Far Cry was the first game to implement a High-Dynamic Range Lighting technique, based on the OpenEXR file format. The format allows all video cards with an FP16 frame buffer and support for FP16 blending to make use of the 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.

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

Below is a table of the best-playable settings that we found best for each video card configuration. In this title, we found that 25 to 30 frames per second minimum and a target of 45 frames per second (or higher) to be the average frame rate in our manual run through. We found that this delivered a smooth and fluid gaming experience across the rest of the title, which were slightly less graphic intense than our manual run through.

Leadtek's Duo PX6600GT Extreme performed very well in Far Cry. In fact, we'll go so far as to say that the Leadtek card was the best of the bunch for this title. All of the video cards were playable at the same settings, but the average frame rate boost from utilising SLI mode meant that Leadtek's Duo PX6600GT Extreme came out on top.

The Radeon X800 XL had the lowest average frame rate at just over 55 frames per second, but the minimum frame rate was more than acceptable at 30 frames per second. The GeForce 6800 GT managed to deliver an average frame rate of 57 frames per second and a minimum of 27 frames per second. Performance for this title is pretty neck and neck between the two single GPU competitors, while the Leadtek Duo PX6600GT Extreme managed to deliver an average frame rate of 72 frames per second and a minimum of 33 fps.