Far Cry is a DirectX9 title that uses a number of DirectX9 and DirectX8 Shaders. The 1.31 patch also utilises PS2.x and PS3.0 shader paths, making use of their longer instruction length capabilities to collapse some rendering passes. The test we are using is a custom Firingsquad demo and the highest shader profile available is used, which on these boards result in the Shader Model 3.0 path for the X1000's and the Shader Model 2.x path for the previous generation Radeons.

Because all of these boards are high performance and out Far Cry test is getting CPU limited on this system we'll go straight to the higher quality tests.

Even with 4x FSAA and 8x AF enabled all the X1000 configurations are CPU limited in all the resolutions tested, with only the X850 showing any performance drop off to any great degree. Because everything is so CPU limited there's not much in the way of Crossfire gains, although at these resolutions is may be a good case for enabling 8x Super AA with Crossfire.

Even with 6x FSAA and 16x Af enabled the performance of these boards are quite CPU limited. At 1600x1200 there is a small fillrate drop of the single boards, such that the X1900 XTX configuration is about 4% faster than the XT and 8% faster than the X1800 XT. The X850 is suffering a much greater performance drop off over the resolutions such that the X1900 XTX is nearly double the performance at 1600x1200.

The Crossfire systems are able to gain small performance increase of their single board variants, but again, its likely that you may be looking towards higher AA configurations than this with a Crossfire setup of these performances.