AS THE GRAPHICS WARS between ATI and NVIDIA have escalated, one of the most favored weapons of both sides has been performance comparisons in big-name games. We've already seen performance previews of Doom III and Half-Life 2, made possible by graphics chip companies, despite the fact that neither game was anywhere near shipping at the time those previews were published.

Today we have something kind of similar, but it involves a shipping game title, the ever-so-sweet shooter Far Cry. The game's publishers, Ubisoft, have worked with NVIDIA to make the game use the Shader Model 3.0 capabilities built into the GeForce 6800 series graphics cards. The version 1.2 patch for Far Cry should be released soon for all the world to see. NVIDIA supplied us with an early copy of the patch a few days back so we could test Far Cry performance using Shader Model 3.0. Read on to see how the new patch performs with Shader Model 3.0, and how the GeForce 6800 series now compares to the Radeon X800 lineup.