Crytek today released the Far Cry 1.32 patch. Sponsored by AMD, it includes a 64 bits extension optimisation of the x86 instructions set available via AMD64 ISA or Intel EM64T. Performance gains measured by AnandTech are however small: 4.2% improvement with Athlon 64 X2 and 6.5% with Pentium 4 D. It's not much but it is something, at least.
This is for the technical part. For the marketing part, it doesn’t seem to be good enough for AMD and this 64 bits version also features a modified LOD to see an increases level of details from a long distance. It is however important to remind you that it is possible to obtain the same results by adjusting manually Far Cry via the console in 32 bits. New graphic effects are available such as improved textures or even parallax mapping support. Finally, two multi player levels and one area for the single player mode are available.
Of course these innovations don’t have, except for the LOD, much to do with the CPU and even less with the 64 bits. Textures and parallax mapping for example only increase the amount of work that the graphic card has to do. After the Pentium accelerating Internet, are we going to see the Athlon 64 improving textures?...
