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Test
System Setup:::...
Epox
8RDA3G (nForce2 Ultra400) (Kindly supplied by Epox)
2x256MB
Corsair (TWINX3200LL) Memory (Kindly Supplied By Corsair)
AMD
AthlonXP 3200+ (Kindly Supplied By AMD)
WD80JB
80GB Hard Drive (Kindly Supplied By Western
Digital)
Windows
XP Pro + SP1 _ DirectX 9.0b
ATi CATALYST 4.7 drivers
Crucial
Radeon X800 Pro (Kindly Supplied By Crucial)
The
following driver settings were used unless otherwise stated
Mipmap
detail level is set to "Quality" at all times.
Antialiasing was set to normal and not Temporal unless otherwise
stated. This applies to both OpenGL and Direct3D.
Far
Cry v1.1:::...
If
you want the marketing speak it goes like this - "The
meticulously designed next-generation CryEngine pushes the
threshold of action gaming with proprietary Polybump™
mapping, advanced environment physics, destructible terrain,
dynamic lighting, motion-captured animation, and total surround
sound."
If
you want my personal thoughts, this is a true visual tour-de-force
with challenging game play, incredible physics, highly detailed
environments and simply stunning graphics. In many, many
ways this is the new standard against which others will
be judged.
I'm
using the v1.1 patch currently due to the v1.2 patch having
been officially withdrawn at the time of this review.
While
the Pro card scales with resolution we can clearly see that
the Platinum is CPU limited right across the three test
resolutions. It's almost a nice bonus to feel that the game
performance will benefit to such an extent when the CPU
next gets upgraded.
And
to see the full range of performance figures, here's how
the two cards shape up with various resolutions and level
of AA and AF dialed in. I think one of the clearest things
to notice here is that Temporal AA does indeed incur a small
performance penalty, probably a latency introduced when
switching from one sample pattern to the other. That's not
so bad considering that 2x Temporal AA is similar in visual
quality to 4x normal mode AA but the need to have V-sync
enabled certainly restricts its usefulness.
Looking
at the lower part of the graph it's surprising to see how
little impact is made by increasing levels of anisotropic
filtering. Here at least we see less than a single frame
per second across the entire range of AA levels.
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