Far Cry Performance
Far Cry with the 1.33 patch has the possibility of running HDR its Shader Model 3.0-based HDR lighting path, the game recognising the R520 XT correctly as a Shader Model 3.0 part. An upcoming patch engineered by Crytek's Carsten Wenzel will do the necessary trickery to make the render path compatible with multisample AA, too. Read more about that in the Technical Discussion.For just now, non-AAd HDR lighting is possible, just like it is on almost all NVIDIA GeForce 6 and 7-series hardware. The game renders the frame into a 1 pixel texture and uses that for the basis of an exposure value for the tone mapping pass.
The X1800 XT is at least 20% faster at all settings, without antialiasing or HDR turned on. The causes could be numerous, the ATI board having a serious vertex processing rate advantage and significantly more memory bandwidth, to say nothing of the apparent efficiency advantages.
With AA and AF levels increased, the gap between the pair reduces (the opposite of what's expected under normal circumstances).
With AA turned off and HDR lighting turned on at level 7 the GeForce edges closer still (again, the logical opposite of what should happen as it gets harder for the game to render compared to no IQ options on) but the X1800 XT maintains its across-the-board superiority.
In CryEngine, 1600x1200 with everything possible IQ wise on is playable on both. 1280x1024 with 6xAA and 16xAF was the sweet spot for maintaining a minimum 60Hz refresh rate for Vsync gaming on an LCD, with the X1800 XT.
