Our testing methods
To test Far Cry with Shader Model 3.0, we set up a test system with Windows XP Pro and the RC2 version of Service Pack 2. We needed the Service Pack because it includes DirectX 9.0c, the new version of DirectX that supports Shader Model 3.0. We also received from NVIDIA a new version of its 61.45 graphics drivers with SM3.0 support enabled.

Version 1.2 of Far Cry will apparently come with four built-in demos for benchmarking. Those demos take place on the four levels mentioned in the NVIDIA presentation. Rather than use those pre-recorded demos, however, we elected to record five of our own—one on each of the four levels NVIDIA mentioned, and one on the "Control" level. The demos are downloadable via a link below.

Although Far Cry does include a timedemo benchmarking function, it's far from ideal. The game doesn't record user interactions with the environment, so playback varies from the sequence originally recorded. Also, the movement of the game's bad guys from one run to the next adds some variance to the scores. As ever, though, we did our best to deliver clean benchmark numbers. Tests were run at least three times, and the score from the first run was discarded. Scores from the second and third run were averaged. Obvious outliers were discarded, and tests were re-run as needed.

We set the game's image quality options as high as possible, including "Very High" for every option except water quality, which we set to "Ultra High." We tested without antialiasing or anisotropic filtering, and then we tested with 4X AA and 8X anisotropic filtering.

Both ATI and NVIDIA cards were left at their driver default settings for image quality, with the exception that we turned off vertical refresh sync on all cards.

Our test system was configured like so:

Thanks to Corsair for providing us with memory for our testing. If you're looking to tweak out your system to the max and maybe overclock it a little, Corsair's RAM is definitely worth considering.

The test systems' Windows desktop was set at 1152x864 in 32-bit color at an 85Hz screen refresh rate. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests.

We used the following versions of our test applications:

• Far Cry 1.2 with TR demos

If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.