Looking Back Pt. 2: X800 & Catalyst Under The Knife

Far Cry

Keyword: ATI Radeon X800

Getting to our first game, Far Cry and its CryEngine 1 represent the first of the modern graphics engines that truly utilized the abilities of SM2.0+ hardware. With its lush jungles and sandy beaches, even as it’s pushing 2 years old, Far Cry is still unrivaled in presenting what a tropical paradise should look like. As a game that has traditionally performed better on ATI’s hardware than NVIDIA’s, it also gives us a chance to look at what, if anything, ATI did for performance when it already had a clear lead in a game.

Without anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering, the results aren’t too surprising. There is some performance improvement, but given ATI’s lead and the fact that the game is older than the R420 itself, minimal performance improvements are to be expected.

By enabling AA/AF, however, we see an entirely different story. With the 5.03 drivers, ATI posted a very impressive 30% performance improvement, moving the game from the realm of being fairly playable with these settings to extremely playable. ATI cites this as being due to efficiency improvements in vertex processing on the R420, which impacted this game heavily. While we can’t see this change without AA/AF, it’s very obvious here with it.

Catalyst 4.05 versus 6.01 (mouse over to see 4.05)

Although the lack of a quick-save/quick-load feature prevents us from taking a set of screenshots perfectly alike, it doesn’t take much effort to see here that there’s not a difference to speak of between the earliest and latest Catalyst drivers, and this is the case throughout all of the drivers, including between the 5.01 and 5.03 drivers.

When it comes to Far Cry, there’s little to say here other than praise for being able to pull off this kind of performance improvement without touching image quality or simply fixing a bug.