Far Cry
Far Cry is tested in three settings groups, across a set of standard resolutions. The first settings group has no IQ enhancements applied.No AA, No AF, No HDR
With no IQ enhancements applied, there's no benefit to running the 7800 GTX either on its own against a single 6800 Ultra, or as a pair against SLI 6800 Ultras. You need to make the cards work harder to see any gains with G70.
4x AA, 8x AF, No HDR
SLI beats a single board, obviously, but otherwise there's no advantage to using the 7800 GTX. Far Cry has a HDR rendering mode tailored to NV40 and G70, though.
0x AA, 8x AF, HDR7
The r_HDRrendering rendering variable is set to 7 for this test. Where 6800 Ultra shows no gains with SLI, a single 7800 GTX is not only faster than 6800 Ultra SLI, but SLI then shows large gains to be had with HDR rendering enabled. On average, SLI 7800 GTX is 30% faster than a single board and it's the first time that Far Cry's HDR rendering has been accelerated to any kind of degree by either a single board or two in SLI.
Other settings for r_HDRrendering show even larger gains. G70's ROP hardware is responsible for the OpenEXR FP buffer compositing that Far Cry uses to apply HDR lighting to a frame. Combined with the new texture filtering performance for FP textures and you can see where G70 is getting its gains.
