Far Cry - High Dynamic Range lighting
Far Cry 1.3 also adds support for OpenEXR high dynamic range (HDR) lighting effects. Here's what HDR lighting looks like in action using the /r_hdrrendering 7 console variable:


Without HDR lighting


With HDR lighting

Purdy. Unfortunately, Far Cry's HDR lighting effects only work on GeForce 6-series cards, so I wasn't able to test performance on the Radeons. Maybe that's not such a bad thing, because at least on the GeForce cards, the performance hit associated with HDR lighting is huge:

As lush as the HDR lighting is, the 6600 GT barely manages 30 frames per second at 1024x768. It looks great, but on the GT, I'd rather have higher resolutions with antialiasing and anisotropic filtering turned up.