Image Quality
Image quality in FarCry is an especially important topic for NVIDIA. Until now, with v1.1 of the game, the image quality offered by its cards was inferior to that of ATi's DirectX 9 boards. With the introduction of the new patch v1.2, this issue has finally been resolved, at least in the case of the GeForce 6800 series. While image quality has also been improved on GeForce FX 5xxx cards, their output is still not quite on the same level as that of the DX9 Radeons and the GF 6800s.
We couldn't make out any display or rendering errors when using SM 3.0. However, we found an interesting quirk with the X800 when using Catalyst 4.6 (4xFSAA and 4xAF enabled) in the level "Volcano." Depending on the perspective, some areas of the scene are not filtered correctly. Change the point of view just slightly, and the glitch vanishes. We're guessing that this is a driver bug in conjunction with the new patch.
Click on the image to get a larger version.
With the new patch, ATi's X800 shows some rendering problems in the map Volcano. It only appears from certain perspectives, however.
On the following pages we will compare the image quality of FarCry v1.1 (taken from our GF 6800 article ) - NVIDIA v60.72, ATi Cat 4.3) and FarCry v1.2 (NVIDIA v61.45, ATi Cat 4.6). In this comparison, the X800 takes the place of the Radeon 9800, as both return almost identical results where IQ is concerned (without AF). Click on the images to view a larger, uncompressed version of the screenshot.
We start with the level "Archive," in which we had noticed strong pixellation of the floor tiles in our initial GF 6800 review.
Farcry v1.1
This is our screenshot from the GeForce 6800 review. We see strong pixellation on the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra and 6800 Ultra.
Farcry v1.2
The new version greatly improves the rendering quality of the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra. Nonetheless, the result is still not perfect. The GeForce 6800, on the other hand, is cured of its rendering problems.
Here is another section of the same scene. As you can see, the lighting on the cabinet is missing on the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra with v1.1 and is too weak on the GeForce 6800 war. Patch v1.2 fixes this problem. Note the difference between Shader Model 2.0 und 3.0. In the new code path, additional gray areas inside the cabinet are displayed.
