Far Cry
We now move on to Far Cry, which recognises the X1800 as an NVIDIA graphic card because it supports Shader Model 3.0. Despite this, the HDR is unfortunately not functional yet. We will have to wait for the next patch used by ATI for demonstrations, which will allow activating HDR and antialiasing simultaneously. We remind you that it isn’t possible with the GeForce 7800.
Without AA and Aniso, the 7800 GTX and X1800 XT provide equivalent performances. Once these effects are activated, however, ATI’s chip takes the lead. The X1800 XL is then at the same level as the 7800 GTX. We have to specify that this was also the case for the X850 XT PE.
Splinter Cell Chaos Theory
Splinter cell detects the presence of Shader Model 3.0 with ATI’s card and opens the possibility to activate all effects. Since the 1.04 patch, it is possible to activate effects such as Soft Shadows, Parallax Mapping, and HDR with Pixel Shader 2.0 cards, whereas this was previously restricted to PS 3.0 cards. We noticed that HDR is far from being comparable to SM 3.0 as it is calculated in whole numbers and not in floating points.
In practice, it is unfortunately this version of HDR which is activated with the Radeon X1800 XT for an unknown reason. Results in this mode aren’t directly comparable to NVIDIA’s graphic cards, so we only compared ATI’s cards to each other. The X1800 XL is on the same level as a X850 XT PE and the X1800 XT is still in the lead with a 33% advance.
Without HDR, X1800 XL and X850 XT PE are still very close. The X1800 XT is still in the lead with a comparable advance. If it provides slightly higher performances than the 7800 GTX without AA / Aniso, it takes the lead once these effects are activated with up to 30% higher performances.
