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FarCry 1.3: Crytek's Last Play Brings HDR and 3Dc for the First Time |
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Written by Phyro
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Wednesday, 03 November 2004 |
X-Bit Labs has published an article on the recent FarCry 1.3 update from Crytek. FarCry title and its engine proved to be the most technologically advanced released in 2004 so far. The game that has been in development since 2001 eventually acquired support for technologies that still have to make it into the mainstream market, the Shaders 2.0b/3.0, HDR and 3Dc. They say the patch 1.3 is the last patch for the FarCry, but it brings loads of important innovations and we decided that we should pay them a great deal of attention.
 FarCry 1.3: Crytek's Last Play Brings HDR and 3Dc for the First Time
Currently neither HDR nor 3Dc are officially supported capabilities, Crytek notes that they are on the beta stage of testing and does not provide any warranties on those techs. Answering on the question whether FarCry has a future the company's officials say that the company is already working on a new engine and a new game project. This means that the true and correct implementation of HDR, 3Dc and some other technologies will be available only in future titles from Crytek, which will be released by EA Games, not UbiSoft, or in upcoming games running FarCry Engine.
Now, let us talk more about performance of modern graphics cards in FarCry game. In case you want to play FarCry game with the highest settings you probably get one of the top graphics cards from ATI Technologies or nVidia Corp. that cost $399 - $499 these days. While products like the GeForce 6600 GT or the GeForce 6800 offer great performance in FarCry, once anisotropic filtering and full-scene antialiasing are enabled, their performance drops.
The main advantage nVidia's GeForce 6-family of graphics cards have over competing Radeon X800 and Radeon X700 hardware is support for HDR. Provided that you spend some time tweaking your game settings, you are likely to find the right balance between image quality and speed for you and enjoy the game with more natural lighting effects.
ATI's Radeon X800 hardware, however, better handles antialiasing and anisotropic filtering quality compared to the GeForce 6800-series, which is also important. Unfortunately, ATI's Radeon X800 has some issues with minimal fps that first emerged when Crytek launched its 1.2 patch and that got worse when they enabled Shader Model 2.0b support. Based on our investigation, those speed drops are not that serious, but some may dislike them.
When you choose more affordable hardware, such as Radeon 9800-series or the GeForce 6600 GT, you are likely to get a very nice price/performance ratio, but you will probably have to compromise image quality for enough speed. nVidia's GeForce FX-series and ATI's Radeon 9600-/X600-series can probably handle the game, it will look perfect, but you will hardly experience FarCry in all of its glory on such graphics cards.
Talking about image quality drawbacks we should say that they may be found on both sides: nVidia GeForce 6 renders shadows not as smoothly as ATI's Radeon X800 and both produce different quality lighting – it's really hard to determine which one is better.
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