Asus EAX1800XT Top

Performance Comparisons with FarCry v1.33 Details: http://www.farcry.ubi.com/

FarCry

Those that have been on top of the gaming scene for some time, probably know that FarCry was one of the most visually impressive games to be released on the PC last year. Courtesy of its proprietary engine, dubbed "CryEngine" by its developers, FarCry's game-play is enhanced by Polybump mapping, advanced environment physics, destructible terrain, dynamic lighting, motion-captured animation, and surround sound. Before titles such as Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 hit the scene, FarCry gave us a taste of what was to come in next-generation 3D gaming on the PC. We benchmarked the graphics cards in this article with a custom-recorded demo run taken in the "Catacombs" area checkpoint, at various resolutions without anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering enabled, and then again with 4X AA and 16X aniso enabled concurrently.

All of the default tests, where no additional pixel processing is used, are essentially CPU bound. Only a few frames per second separate all of the cards in the default tests, and they all hovered at or just above the 100 FPS mark, which is plenty fast for FarCry.  With anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering enabled though, we begin to see more of a spread. The Asus EAX1800XT Top pulls off the second best overall scores, falling behind only the brand new Radeon X1900 XTX. The 512MB GeForce 7800 GTX was also a bit faster at the lower resolution, but in the more taxing high-resolution test, the EAX1800XT Top comes out ahead of both of the GeForce cards.