What's New in 1.2?
We have, unfortunately, not had the chance or pleasure of speaking with CryTek on the subject, but NVIDIA has given us a heads up on what the new patch includes in the way of SM3.0 support and the features of the SM3.0 rendering path. From what we can gather, there are two performance enhancing developments in the CryEngine made possible by SM3.0 in the new patch.As for VS3.0, instancing is implemented when rendering grass. Instancing helps to reduce CPU and bus overhead by allowing the engine to send one model to the vertex shader where multiple "instances" of the object are manipulated and moved about the scene as necessary. With all the grass in FarCry, it's easy to see how this could be beneficial.
Under PS3.0, CryTek has apparently implemented single-pass per-pixel lighting. With this per-pixel lighting model, a pixel shader is run that takes into account and processes all light sources in the level that affect a particular pixel in one pass. The PS2.0 implementation apparently uses multiple rendering passes (one for each light) for each affected pixel. This means that in heavily lighted scenes, one (more intense) lighting pass can run, which eliminates the time it takes to setup and execute another pass, even if both implementations have the same result. It is unclear to us exactly why this is possible in PS3.0 and not in PS2.0 (we have even seen examples of technology like this running on PS2.0 hardware). We would really love the chance to go more in-depth with Crytek about their lighting algorithms.
At this point, this is all we know about the new SM3.0 rendering path in FarCry. So, theoretically, running around with your flashlight on in an outdoor (very grassy) night scene with lots of lights everywhere would offer the best performance boost that NVIDIA could see from the new rendering path. There are scenes like this in the game. We actually test a night scene with grass (the regulator level), though it doesn't have an abundance of light sources (or a flashlight).
If these are the only differences between the SM2.0 and SM3.0 paths, then all we heard about were the performance enhancing features. We do appreciate NVIDIA providing us with the patch and information before it went live on Ubisoft's website, but we would still rather have had some of this information directly from the source. Obviously, we want to present a fair and unbiased account of what's actually happening, and we should be fine as long as we take proper precautions and consider as many angles as possible.
And on that note, we've been in touch with ATI about a rendering issue that we noticed with the FarCry 1.2 patch under WinXP SP2, DX9.0c, and ATI's latest public driver (4.6). The problem appears to be incorrect mipmap selection on particular sections of the ground (usually on uneven ground) throughout the game. We've seen this appear as the result of an incorrectly set LOD in the past, but we don't know what is causing this. To be very clear about the issue, here's a portion of a screenshot of the ground right out in front of us in the volcano level.
ATI assures us that they have also been working with CryTek on their efforts. Since we have seen a performance improvement with the latest driver and new 1.2 patch, we don't have any reason to think that anything extraordinarily fishy is going on behind the scenes between NVIDIA and Crytek. We would obviously like to see this texturing issue fixed.
Since performance characteristics in FarCry are dominated by shader performance rather than the texel fill rate or the size of the texture used (especially if it's still being trilinearly filtered as it appears to be the case from the screenshot), our opinion is that this issue will not significantly artificially improve the performance numbers that we see from ATI.
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Illissius - Friday, July 2, 2004 - link
For these benches, were nVidia's trilinear and/or anisotropic optimizations on or off? (This would help in comparing results with other sites, for example.) I don't recall seeing them mentioned, but they're getting to be as important as the driver revision these days.DerekWilson - Friday, July 2, 2004 - link
DAPUNISHER:I'm not sure about the 64bit version of any game, as game developers are much more likely to hold everything until MS releases WinXP64 than hardware vendors. My guess is that we can expect not to see any visual improvements or differences with the 64bit move. There's much less reason to alter the graphics of the game when gaining more registers and memory address space than when you add the ability to do conditional rendering, floating point frame buffers, instancing, and all that...
Zak,
We could try to guess performance based on these numbers:
http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=2044&...
But we didn't use those because they're based on the 1.1 version of farcry under dx9b and Catalyst 4.4 ...
Our focus was the impact of SM3.0, not on overall relative performance, but in the future we will include older generation cards even when looking at next gen features. You are right, it does provide a way to relate to the numbers, and those cards should be in there for completeness' sake as well. Thanks for the suggestion.
Zak - Friday, July 2, 2004 - link
I wish you guys would include one or two benchmarks on some older video cards to give a point of reference for those, such as myself, who still run R9800 and older generation cards. Without seeing how the game performs on R9800 or eqivalent card it's hard to relate to these benchmarks.Zak
DAPUNISHER - Friday, July 2, 2004 - link
Very impressed with the GT's performance in this version. When can we expect your preview of FarCry 64bit version with the SM3 path Derek? and will 64bit bring some new eye candy or more performance? Inquiring minds want to know :-)Warder45 - Friday, July 2, 2004 - link
Interesting. Some odd stuff like ATI's X800 line actually decreasing in performace with the 1.2 patch. I wonder if thats a driver issue that now needs to be fixed, but if I was an ATI owner I'd stick with the 1.1 version of the game. I'd really like to see someone benchmark with omega's drivers for ATI, and see if there's any difference in performace there.#9, That article at tom's is from the NV40 review months ago. This new verison, 1.2 fixes most of the IQ problems nvidia was having.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/far...
So far the only IQ problem I've seen mentioned with the new version.
araczynski - Friday, July 2, 2004 - link
very nice, that 68UE sure is kicking some tail, before AND after the SM3.perhaps this will lead to developers optomizing (to some small degree at elast) their code for the 2 camps? (or at least for the camp that pays them the most...)
in any case, here's to hoping the 68U/UE are priced acceptably by xmas, or at least next tax time :)
Shad0hawK - Friday, July 2, 2004 - link
"Then, during the ATi refresh,we will all be greeted the the Geforce 6900, 6900 Ultra, 6900 Turbo and 6900 Ultra Hyper Fighting Edition."actually that will probobly be after ATI anounces the super golden/silver platinum extra extra XT edition with not only one but TWO "free" certificates for games not out yet
nserra - Friday, July 2, 2004 - link
#1, #2, #3, #4:I think the huge hit is because nvidia is not doing AA to the all scene as ati does.
The new drivers from nvidia have this ability. How do you think nvidia have come to top so soon, after some driver release ... Trilinear optimizations, Shader optimizations and now AA optimizations...
I also don't understand why only toms site notes differences between ati and nvidia image quality...
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20040414/...
ZobarStyl - Friday, July 2, 2004 - link
Bearxor, though I agree the overclocked editions are silly, don't act like ATi doesn't do the exact same thing...Ultra Extreme = XT Platinum Edition
Ultra = XT
GT = Pro
vanilla 6800 has no direct competitor, but it held it's own occasionally against the Pro in the review.
Both of the double-named cards are just the top end overclocked, so I tend to ignore them in the reviews, but then the GT was beating all of the ATi cards in some of those demos too...
RyanVM - Friday, July 2, 2004 - link
#6, Ditto :p. Dell 2001FP for life :D