Far Cry Benchmarks - Shader Model 3.0 performance

[Arioch]

Heh just got to my friend's house - it's about 60 miles away from Austin where I live.

I guess the bottom line is that now all the new cards can run this game at 1600x1200 with 4xAA/8AF and maintain playable frame rates throughout - that's a good thing!

[ChrisRay]

Ok I have updated my performance results to include Levels Archive and Fort.

As you can see. the SM 3.0 pathway doesnt improve performance everywhere. Paticularly the archive scene.

I used the same method for ingame benchmarking with fraps as well.

Chris






*edit* Fixed.

[fivefeet8]

Originally Posted by ChrisRay

Ok I have updated my performance results to include Levels Archive and Fort.

As you can see. the SM 3.0 pathway doesnt improve performance everywhere. Paticularly the archive scene.

I used the same method for ingame benchmarking with fraps as well.

Chris




*edit* Fixed.

1025x768 resolution? Hehe. Nice graph btw.

[ChrisRay]

Originally Posted by fivefeet8

1025x768 resolution? Hehe. Nice graph btw.

Sigh its always some damn thing...


Anyway fivefeet its been fixed.

[Waffles]

Hey Chrisray - I don't know how difficult it is, but XBIT is showing the MIN FPS on the bar graph, would you be able to do the same thing? I think min fps is just as important as the average...

[Arioch]

Have you guys seen the thread at Beyond3D that explains why the Anandtech review is showing bigger gains than some of the other websites? Apparently Anandtech did not use AA as they thought they did when running the benchmarks according to this thread:

Beyond3D Thread on Anandtech's SM3.0 Testing

I thought the score discrepancies seemed a bit off between some of the websites. The 6800 Ultra is still getting a nice performance boost but it appears both equal level cards are about the same performance - faster than hell which is not a bad thing.

[SH64]

Looking at the GT vs Pro numbers in X-Bit bench .. i can see some clear advantage for the extra pipelines ! ( or extra qaud pumped pipelines as MUYA like to call it )

[Bad_Boy]

anandtech fixed the numbers. GT still looks like the card to get for the value.

[Drumphil]

sorry but couldnt resist..
can any one imagine all top titles Hl2/Doom3/Stalker/Thief with this kind SM3.0 improvements? and this is just the begining

from anandtech:

Image quality of both SM2.0 paths are on par with eachother, and the SM3.0 path on NVIDIA hardware shows negligable differences. The very slight variations are most likely just small fluctuations between the mathematical output of a single pass and a multipass lighting shader. The difference is honestly so tiny that you can't call either rendering lower quality from a visual standpoint. We will still try to learn what exactly causes the differences we noticed from CryTek.

The main point that the performance numbers make is not that SM3.0 has a speed advantage over SM2.0 (as even the opposite may be true), but that single pass per-pixel lighting models can significantly reduce the impact of adding an ever increasing number of lights to a scene.

what conclusions did the other reviewers come to?

[jAkUp]

UPDATE: It has recently come to our attention that our 4xAA/8xAF benchmark numbers for NVIDIA 6800 series cards were incorrect when this article was first published. The control panel was used to set the antialiasing level, which doesn't work with FarCry unless set specifically in the FarCry profile (which was not done here). We appologize for the error, and have updated our graphs and analysis accordingly.

For a more positive update, after a discussion with CryTek about the new rendering path, we have learned that the lighting model implimented in the SM3.0 Path is exactly the same as was used in the SM2.0 Path. The only exception is that they used the conditional rendering (branching in the pixel shader) to emulate multipass lighting in a single pixel shader. The performance gains we see actually indicate that PS3.0 branching does not have as significant a performance hit as previously thought (and proves to be more efficient than using multiple pixel shaders in a scene).

...

[Jarred]

Originally Posted by jAkUp

...

are they talking about sm3.0 in general? becasue thats not what I'm seeing in the graphs

[shinrai]

I wouldn't mind seeing what hardocp come up with.

Yes i know their not popular here but hey, it's a good site.