Far Cry - Cooler
We're using the 1.2 version of Far Cry, which includes support for the longer shader programs and geometry instancing capabilities that are part of Shader Model 3.0. We tested the GeForce 6600 GT with the SM3.0 code path and also with the SM2.0 path, in order to show what sort of performance difference the new shader model can make. (All the output is identical, regardless of the shader path. Far Cry uses the newer shader models only for better performance.) For the GeForce 6800, we tested with the SM3.0 path and skipped the SM2.0 path.

Far Cry 1.2 also supports ATI's Shader Model 2.0b, but the ATI cards we're testing here aren't capable of the full SM2.0b feature set—only the Radeon X800 series is, right now. Nevertheless, we used the SM2.0b path on all the ATI cards, and we explicitly enabled geometry instancing, as well, which all the Radeon cards here support. To show the difference between the SM2.0 path and the SM2.0b path, we tested the Radeon X600 XT using both code paths.

We used "Very high" for all in-game quality settings, with the exception of water, which was set to "Ultra high." In other words, everything was maxed out.

This first Far Cry test uses the Cooler level, one of the game's indoor levels which has lots of long shaders and shadows.