Asus Extreme N7800GTX Top - GeForce 7800 GTX

Next we'll move to a more graphically challenging environment for the ASUS Extreme N7800GTX Top with our Far Cry testing.  This time we've tossed in both cards to show you SLI-driven numbers at these very robust "stock overclocked" GeForce 7800GTX speeds that the Extreme N7800GTX Top has to offer.

Performance Comparisons with FarCry v1.31 Details: http://www.farcry.ubi.com/

FarCry

FarCry is one of the most visually impressive games to be released on the PC platform to date, courtesy of its proprietary engine, dubbed "CryEngine" by its developers. FarCry's game-play is enhanced by graphics with Polybump mapping, advanced environment physics, destructible terrain, dynamic lighting, motion-captured animation, and surround sound. The game is rife with lush, brightly lit outdoor environments, and high-poly models that are capable of taxing most of today's high-end 3D graphics hardware. We benchmarked the graphics cards in this review with a custom-recorded demo run taken in the "Catacombs" area checkpoint, at various resolutions without anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering enabled, and then with 4X AA and 16X aniso enabled concurrently

Far Cry is built on a DirectX 9-driven game engine, and we see very similar results here compared to what we have shown you in our previous 3DMark05 testing.  In fact when under heavy loads, as with our 4X AA / 16X Aniso settings, a single ASUS Extreme N7800GTX Top bests the BFG GeForce 7800GTX OC by a virtually identical margin of about 5%.  Further, with a core GPU clock speed advantage of ~5.5%, it doesn't take a physics degree to see why the trend shouldn't continue in all of our upcoming tests. 

What's perhaps more impressive are the SLI numbers, where even at high resolutions of 1600 x 1200 with 4X AA and 16X AF, a pair of these new cards from ASUS are capable of holding up 100+ FPS.  If this doesn't have you "jonesing" for a little GF 7800GTX - SLI lovin' we're not sure what will.  On the contrary, just to bring you back down to earth a bit, you'll also notice that the legacy generation of GeForce 6800 Ultra and ATi Radeon X850 XT cards also maintain highly playable frame rates at this setting.  Perhaps they're just not quite as silky smooth when the action gets heavy in a First Person Shooter like Far Cry.