Mid-Range PCI-Express shootout

FarCry

Publisher: Ubisoft

Image Quality:

Here, I am using the full retail version of FarCry patched to version 1.3. I 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".

We found that all three video cards best-playable settings were the same in this title - FarCry is a fairly evenly-balanced title and the latest video cards from both ATI and NVIDIA performs very well in one of the biggest games of last year. We read about performance improvements in FarCry with Catalyst 5.2 a few days ago.

There are still massive differences between the way that ATI and NVIDIA render the roof of the Factory in FarCry, and we are still no closer to finding an answer as to the correct way that this portion of the title should be rendered. I guess we could say that it is a matter of personal preference and it’s a fairly minor detail. The difference is even more apparent if you look at the full-size screen shots - there is a hexagonal pattern on the window in the screenshot from the two X700 Pro’s, while the screen shot from the BFGTech 6600GT OC shows that NVIDIA’s drivers are choosing to emit large amounts of bright light from the window to the extent where we no longer see the pattern on there.

Performance:

It is a very close call between the HIS X700 Pro IceQ Turbo and the BFGTech 6600GT OC, with the HighTech card having the slight advantage by a mere one frame per second - hardly worth writing home about. The interesting thing is that Club3D’s "stock" Radeon X700 Pro is a good way behind, but still delivered a playable gaming experience at 1024x768 2xAA 8xAF at Very High Quality in-game detail settings.