Final Words
Both of our custom benchmarks show ATI cards leading without anisotropic filtering and antialiasing enabled, with NVIDIA taking over when the options are enabled. We didn't see much improvement from the new SM3.0 path in our benchmarks either. Of course, it just so happened that we chose a level that didn't really benefit from the new features the first time we recorded a demo. And, with the mangoriver benchmark, we were looking for a level to benchmark that didn't follow the style of benchmarks that NVIDIA provided us with in order to add perspective.Even some of the benchmarks with which NVIDIA supplied us showed that the new rendering path in FarCry isn't a magic bullet that increases performance across the board through the entire game.
Image quality of both SM2.0 paths are on par with eachother, and the SM3.0 path on NVIDIA hardware shows negligable differences. The very slight variations are most likely just small fluctuations between the mathematical output of a single pass and a multipass lighting shader. The difference is honestly so tiny that you can't call either rendering lower quality from a visual standpoint. We will still try to learn what exactly causes the differences we noticed from CryTek.
The main point that the performance numbers make is not that SM3.0 has a speed advantage over SM2.0 (as even the opposite may be true), but that single pass per-pixel lighting models can significantly reduce the impact of adding an ever increasing number of lights to a scene.
It remains to be seen whether or not SM3.0 offer a significant reduction in complexity for developers attempting to implement this advanced functionality in their engines, as that will be where the battle surrounding SM3.0 will be won or lost.
UPDATE: CryTek has pointed out that the new lighting implimentation is essentially the same but uses branching in the pixel shader to accomplish what needed to be done in multiple shaders under the PS2.0 path. This indicates that the conditional rendering feature of SM3.0 is actually faster than using multiple shaders (which gives NVIDIA 6 series cards a performance advantage when multiple shaders would have been required).
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Anemone - Friday, July 2, 2004 - link
Am one of the increasing numbers of folks who does ues 1600x1200 on everything that supports it, just fyi. Now it's lcd, but before my 19" crt happily did that res too, and that's now many years old.Just for note only. :)
bearxor - Friday, July 2, 2004 - link
Yea, when are we even going to be able to buy a Ultra or "Ultra Extreme".Heck, I never even heard of "Ultra Extreme" until this preview.
I guess when ATi releases new drivers, nVidia will have to launch the long-rumored and much-hyped Geforce 6800 Ultra-Extreme Hyper Edition.
Then, during the ATi refresh,we will all be greeted the the Geforce 6900, 6900 Ultra, 6900 Turbo and 6900 Ultra Hyper Fighting Edition.
They're getting as bad as Capcom these days...
Pete - Friday, July 2, 2004 - link
Whoa, some huge gains for nV. I honestly didn't expect to see such clear differences this early--props to them.ATi's AA hit may be due to an under-performing programmable memory controller, per ATi ppl. We may see them improve memory-intense AA+AF numbers with newer drivers that better utilize the controller. Dunno if that can compensate for nV's huge SM3.0 gains, though.
I'm still a little baffled by the ever-faster "Ultra Extreme" models, though, considering we haven't seen one for even presale (AFAIK) in the many weeks since the 6800U's launch.
TheSnowman - Friday, July 2, 2004 - link
well Jeff, that explains why ati's peformace tanks, but it does nothing to explain why nvidia's doesn't.Jeff7181 - Friday, July 2, 2004 - link
Very nice article guys.Only thing I'd like to see that I didn't was lower res benchmarks, since I think it's safe to say that most people don't have monitors that support 1600x1200 at a decent refresh rate. Hell... mine can't do 1280x1024 at a decent rate.
Oh... and gordon151... I wonder if it could be because of the large amounts of objects to be anti-aliased. Grass, trees, etc. ... combine that with the HUGE draw distances and you've got quite a task on your hands. Just my theory anyway :)
gordon151 - Friday, July 2, 2004 - link
I've been wondering lately why performance tanks so much with the x800 series when AA is enabled in Farcry. It almost cuts in half when applying 4xAA, which is something you don't see in other games.