Far Cry
Far Cry is arguably up there as a contender for game of the year, and it doesn't shirk its duties in the graphical department either, being as it is the first game to make use of the new shader models seen with the introduction of the current generation of hardware with the advent of the v1.3 patch we will be using here. Our benchmarking here utilises a custom timedemo based around the game's 'Research' level, and all in-game options were at the Very High setting for testing. Bear in mind that the ATI and NVIDIA cards on test here are using different pixel shader models - 3.0 for the two NVIDIA boards, and 2.0b for the Radeon X700. Obviously, this isn't entirely 'apples to apples', but it is what you will experience when playing the game with these boards yourself by default.
The 6600GT takes a clear lead across all resolutions here, most likely due to its higher core clock compared to the other two boards in what is quite a shader-intensive benchmark. Meanwhile, MSI's NX6600 does a good job of keeping pace with the Radeon X700 PRO, matching it stride for stride.
Again, the issue of video RAM rears its ugly head again, with the two 128MB boards taking a big drop in performance beyond 1024x768 with AA and AF enabled, while the X700 PRO manages to keep its head above water. All three boards perform well at 1024x768 at these settings, with the 6600GT again taking the lead with the other two boards neck and neck.
