HARDOCP - NVIDIA GeForce 6800GT PCI-E - FarCry Patch 1.3 & SM 3.0

Date:: Wednesday, October 27, 2004
Author:: Brent Justice
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FarCry Patch 1.3 & SM 3.0

Patch version 1.3 for FarCry is here and with it we finally have Shader Model 3.0 support. Does it live up to the hype that we have been hearing about for so long? Does it provide better image quality compared to Shader Model 2.0? Let’s find out.

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NVIDIA GeForce 6800GT PCI-E

Now it is time to get down to what everyone wants to know. How much faster is FarCry with Shader Model 3.0 and does it look any better. We are using an NVIDIA GeForce 6800GT PCI-E video card. This card is clocked at the default settings for a 6800GT, 350MHz GPU and 500MHz (1GHz DDR) memory. We are using the latest beta drivers (that are WHQL certified for the 6800 series) available from NVIDIA; version 66.81. We are using the default driver settings so all optimizations are at their default levels. We left AA and AF to be set by application preference so that we can completely control AA and AF from within the game.

Here is how the graphics settings compare between the patches. As you can see with Patch 1.1 the game is detecting to use hardware shaders for NV3x GPUs. With Patch 1.3 the game is now detecting to use hardware shaders for NV4x GPU. Also notice that now with Patch 1.3, Pixel and Vertex Shader 3.0 is automatically in use. You can also see that HDR Rendering reads as FP16 and MRT Rendering is Enabled.

We ran all the testing with the highest in-game quality settings available. In Patch 1.1 the highest in-game AF setting is 4X. With Patch 1.3 they have included an 8XAF option. To find out if performance was better at all we left the option at 4X in the 1.3 patch as well. We first used the 1.1 patch and found the highest playable setting, which on our system with this GeForce 6800GT was 1280x1024 NoAA/4XAF. We used this same setting with Patch 1.3 to see if there was any increase in performance. We did a manual-run through in the level “Fort” which is mostly an outdoors run-through and we did a manual-run through in the level “Control” which is indoors and has a lot of lighting shaders in use.

Outdoors Level - Fort

Looking at this graph you can see where we have some places that with Patch 1.3 performance is faster, but there are some places with patch 1.3 that it is slower. The minimum framerate with patch 1.3 is down 6 frames to 20 compared to patch 1.1 because of one spot that was exceptionally brutal on our framerate. We will explain with more details below. The average framerate with patch 1.3 was slightly faster, but overall performance was erratic with patch 1.3. We say “erratic” because we experienced some problems that distracted from gameplay using the new patch.

Hitching/Pausing/Hiccups!

Hitching, pausing, and hiccups. All of the words above describe the types of problems we experienced with patch 1.3 on this GeForce 6800GT with driver version 66.81. This problem only occurred after we installed patch 1.3, it did not occur with patch 1.1.

Throughout the game we experienced random slight pauses or hitches. Sometimes these pauses lasted for less than a second and were just a brief annoyance, but others lasted for at least a second and were a major annoyance and distracted from gameplay. These longer pauses were most noticeable when a character would enter the screen and start firing his weapon. It seems it was pausing right at the point that the muzzle flash was visible. It also happened when the player started to shoot an enemy. We also experienced long pausing when we shot at explosive containers resulting in an explosion. (Editors Note: Playing FarCry on a BFGTech 6800 Ultra has not shown me the same instances that Brent has seen with pausing in the game. My gameplay has been just fine with FarCry’s patch 1.3 installed.)

The below graph outlines some of the important parts from our manual-run through with a bit of explanation.

Starting from the left and moving to the right we have first highlighted some dips in the framerate that were caused by these random pauses we experienced. These occurred at the beginning of the Fort level.

As we move on, you can see where we have outlined an area with a rectangle that shows a part of the Fort level were Geometry Instancing was definitely improving performance. This is the part in the Fort level where you are in the deep forest surrounded by trees, grass, and bushes working your way up to the stairs to get to the facilities on the top of the hill. In that scene, moving through the forest performance was much better with patch 1.3.

Then we come to the last rectangle, the point at which we shoot at a canister so it explodes killing two of the characters. As you can see with Patch 1.1 the framerate dropped down to 42FPS, but with Patch 1.3 it dropped all the way down to 20FPS. We ran through this same level 3 times, and the results you see above are the results taken from the third run-through. Because of this there should be no hitching or pausing due to memory loading textures, since this card has 256MB of local RAM. Keep in mind also that this is a PCI-Express 16X bus enabled card and it shouldn’t have any problem loading textures other than IO latency. Still we think this to be a bug though.

The best we can do to show you these pauses visually is to show you screenshots where we experienced them. This way you can at least get an idea of what is being shown on the screen when these pauses occur.

The first two screenshots are some points that are shown in the above graph where there was just slight pausing, nothing major. The third screenshot though shows you that exploding canister in our manual run through where we experienced a long pause. Note that this doesn’t only happen in Fort, we experienced this in many other levels in FarCry.

Indoors Level - Control

This next graph is an indoor level where we found a lot of lighting taking place, reflecting off walls and floors and such which makes a good pixel shader test. It is important to note that this particular run-through does not have any enemies shooting or reacting to the player, unlike Fort, so there is no AI. This is purely a good test for finding out if pixel shader performance is faster in FarCry.

Overall there isn’t a whole lot of difference except at the beginning of our manual run-through, which had some spikes of much faster performance with Patch 1.3. Other then that both drop down to the same minimum FPS and the average is within 3FPS of each other.

Image Quality

We did not see a huge difference in performance, but let’s see what we find looking at these image quality shots. The most important thing we are looking for here is to see if Shader Model 3.0 has any image quality differences compared to Shader Model 2.0. For these comparisons we set the in-game settings exactly the same between the patches so that we can make comparisons. We used 1024x768 with NoAA and 4XAF with all the in-game quality settings at their maximum values.

Comparisons

In the first comparison screenshot above, there is no difference at all between Patch 1.1 and 1.3. In the second comparison screenshot we can see the lighting difference between Patch 1.1 and 1.3, which we also observed on the Radeon X800XT. In the third comparison screenshot we find that Patch 1.3 does improve shader quality here. The floor lights reflection and ceiling reflection are rendered smooth with no blocking or banding. In the fourth screenshot we see another example of the difference in lighting with Patch 1.3, which is the same thing we saw with the Radeon X800XT. Finally in the last screenshot comparison you can see there is a large performance increase and some slight improvements in image quality with Patch 1.3 due to the lighting shaders being rendered better than with Patch 1.1.

You may remember a certain screenshot we have shown in past reviews that shows artifacts being rendered on blue tile. Well, we may no longer have to show you this screenshot because the problem has been fixed with Patch 1.3!

We also noticed the same water quality differences that we experienced on the Radeon X800XT. The ladder is less visible under the water in the first screenshot, and in the second the water is darker with Patch 1.3.

We saw a large increase in performance on the Radeon X800XT with this screenshot of the Sun on the previous page so we wanted to see if Patch 1.3 sped it up on the GeForce 6800GT. Apparently it did not by much.

Full Screen Comparisons

(Patch 1.1, Patch 1.3)

Just as we saw with Patch 1.3 on the Radeon X800XT the water here is darker compared to patch 1.1. The GeForce 6800GT did not get a performance boost here with Patch 1.3.