EB: "Tricks up their sleeves - ATI, nVidia and Far Cry

digitalwanderer

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Hanners just posted a new article up at Elite Bastards that I really liked his draft on. (I read the draft this weekend, but I haven't read the finished article yet. :rolleyes: )

Gratuitous quote:

Hanners of Elite Bastards said:
The announcement of the 1.2 patch for Far Cry caused quite a commotion - Certainly far more of a stir than you would normally expect from a simple update for an already available game title. The reason for this was, of course, the fact that this was no ordinary patch. Rather than simply a rag-bag of bug fixes with the odd new map or little feature thrown in for good measure, the patch announcement had one big, show-stopping change - The addition of Shader Model 3.0 support.

In the last few weeks, we've seen a host of sites running tests with the beta 1.2 Far Cry patch, showing the gains to be had from running the Shader Model 3.0 path. But, that's only part of the story, and today we'll be looking at the bigger picture - Namely, how the Far Cry 1.2 patch affects both nVidia and ATIs current hardware. If you though the update was all about nVidia, you'd be very wrong...
It's pimpage, but it's pimpage for Hanners and it's another damn fine read from him....he's shaping up nicely. ;)

Oh, you can go read the whole thing over here at EB.
 
Re: EB: "Tricks up their sleeves - ATI, nVidia and Far

digitalwanderer said:
Hanners just posted a new article up at Elite Bastards that I really liked his draft on. (I read the draft this weekend, but I haven't read the finished article yet. :rolleyes: )

Gratuitous quote:

Hanners of Elite Bastards said:
The announcement of the 1.2 patch for Far Cry caused quite a commotion - Certainly far more of a stir than you would normally expect from a simple update for an already available game title. The reason for this was, of course, the fact that this was no ordinary patch. Rather than simply a rag-bag of bug fixes with the odd new map or little feature thrown in for good measure, the patch announcement had one big, show-stopping change - The addition of Shader Model 3.0 support.

In the last few weeks, we've seen a host of sites running tests with the beta 1.2 Far Cry patch, showing the gains to be had from running the Shader Model 3.0 path. But, that's only part of the story, and today we'll be looking at the bigger picture - Namely, how the Far Cry 1.2 patch affects both nVidia and ATIs current hardware. If you though the update was all about nVidia, you'd be very wrong...
It's pimpage, but it's pimpage for Hanners and it's another damn fine read from him....he's shaping up nicely. ;)

Oh, you can go read the whole thing over here at EB.

Lol, nice review hanners!
 
Most excellent review. I like how he built up the Nvidia v ATI climax at the end :LOL:

Very impressive showing from both parties and kudos to Crytek too. I think the three heavyweight rounds -> Far Cry/Doom3/HL2 between the GT and PRO are going to make for some exciting times. The GT seems to have a leg up at the moment though.
 
My fave parts of Hanners articles are always his intros and conclusions, he's got a flair for being fair and still being honest. 8)
 
Very nice review, especially by also putting the 9800 in concerning instancing.


Something interesting I noticed... The new SM2.0b and SM3.0 mostly seem to increase performance, when the GPU was having an easy task allready, but not when the going gets tough... :!:

To explain what I mean, just look at the first graph showing the results of SM2.0b.

The regulator and training scenes perform at 59 and 61 fps resp. using 2.0. Going to 2.0b gives only 1 fps gain.
Now, the Research and Volcano perform at much higher framerates, 74 and 83 resp. Here, going to SM2.0b gives gains of 7 and 12 gain.

Everyone is excited at those 12fps gain going from 83 tot 95 fps...
But actually, that's a bit useless, as it was allready 20 fps faster than the other scenes.... It's the other scenes where you'd want a boost. Because those are limiting the settings at which you play. (Unless you're switching settings between scenes...)

Now, I don't want to sound negative, but looking at the new pixel shaders from this angle, means that in most cases on both ATI and NVidia you gain about 1 fps. (The performance gain of the lowest performing scene)
Only at 4xAA does the 6800GT show a little bigger improvement up to 3 fps...

Ofcourse, these benches don't neccesarily tell the whole story, and any performance increase is always good, but the improvements do seem a bit 'acadamic'. Not only for instancing, but also for the pixel shaders.


Before someone acuses me of being negative... This ofcourse means that Crytek did a fantastic job programming Facry. It's so well optimized, that even improved techniques from hardware that didn't exist when the game was released, can't improve the performance in a usefull way. :D
 
Ylandro said:
The new SM2.0b and SM3.0 mostly seem to increase performance, when the GPU was having an easy task allready, but not when the going gets tough... :!:
Methinks that is the CPU bottle-neck kicking in.
 
digitalwanderer said:
Ylandro said:
The new SM2.0b and SM3.0 mostly seem to increase performance, when the GPU was having an easy task allready, but not when the going gets tough... :!:
Methinks that is the CPU bottle-neck kicking in.

Depends on the app/game. Far Cry is a real CPU killer in some levels....

Thomas
 
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