Far Cry

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.

Despite this title being a DirectX9 based application, the "normal" rendering setting has displayed CPU limitations previously, so we'll take a look at "normal" rendering with the engines HDR path enabled first.

With the HDR path enabled in this Far Cry test the performances are somewhat more graphics limited than was the case with UT2004. Here the GTX 512MB board is performing up to 23% faster than the GTX 256MB board, which most closely relates to the fill-rate differences between them - in fact, G70 has half the blend rate at FP16 than it does with 32-bit (8-bit per component) pixels, so its not too surprising that the performance differences follows the theoretical fill-rate differences as opposed to anything else. Thanks to the higher clocks and pipeline differences the 7800 GTX 512MB board is able to scale up to twice the performance of the 6800 Ultra here.

4x AA and 8x AF is actually less demanding on these boards than HDR rending is, so all of them have higher performances, but that does also result in them being a little more CPU limited. The largest performance gap between the GTX 512MB and GTX 256MB is 22%.

With the high quality IQ settings of 8xS TrAA and 16x AF enabled the performance difference between the boards is about 20% at higher resolutions, which is a little lower than the fill/fragment rate differences between the boards, and substantially less than the bandwidth differences.