Far Cry
We used an internal demo, which is a mix of outdoor and indoor locations recorded in the "catacombs" map. We activate the post process "cold" or "hot" filter, which noticeably increased image quality. With the post process and HDR, our honest impression is that rendering quality is from another era and we rediscover the game. This post process filter leads to +/-20% performance reduction.
Anisotropic filtering 8X was activated in the game.
ATI is in the lead with a 10% advantage for the X1900 XTX over the 7800 GTX 512 MB. The X1900 in CrossFire seems to have trouble detecting the right rendering mode and performances decrease instead of increase. Anyway there are no expected gains since the CPU restricts performance.
There is the same problem for the CrossFire with antialiasing. The Radeon, alone, increases its gap with the GeForce. In 1920, the Radeon X1800 XT ends up right in front of the 7800 GTX 512.
The Radeon and GeForce use a similar rendering based on FP16. It isn´t perfectly identical, because the image is less burned for ATI. This is the result of more subtle HDR data processing. During its release, the Radeon X1800 XT was slower than a GeForce 6800 GT in this test, but it is now faster than the 7800 GTX. The evolution has been more than significant. This time the CrossFire is back in the game and finishes in front of all cards with a net advantage over SLI. The latter has some trouble in increasing performances. A single X1900 XTX is very close to 2 7800 GTX 512 MBs.
Because of FP16, the GeForce can´t use antialiasing with HDR. New cards increase performances, but the difference isn´t that great compared to the X1800XT. The CrossFire is very useful and 1600 x 1200 is almost playable. High resolution, HDR, FSAA what more can you ask for?
