Far Cry discussion...

not sure if this belongs here or anywhere else, but i wanted to bring up the hardware and graphics issues with it. i just bought this game for my new computer and was wondering what resolutions and graphic settings anyone else is playing with? are there any benchmarks for it?

Not sure what you mean by "benchmarks for it". FarCry is used in many recent video card reviews, so you can see the relative performance of different cards running the game.

I personally play at 1024x768 with all settings on "high" (not ultra or whatever the very top is), don't think I use AA, but very good playable framerates w/ 9800pro and P4 2.4c@3.0ghz

isn't that pretty much what a benchmark is?

like whenever i see reviews with certain cards i always see a game being used as a benchmark? i dont know if there's a program built-in for advanced users or if the reviewers just use the fps that's in most games. im not sure how to put it, unless they just use games like Unreal Tournament to play and then use a third party benchmarking program to actually benchmark the individual game. cuz i tried downloading one that was supposed to benchmark far cry but i was lost the whole way through . i've been playing at those settings too, though i think i turned on Anti-aliasing. i dont know what it is but i hear it alot i think what im trying to say is, what's a good framerate (or the max) for the radeon 9800 and my system , and is the frames per second always limited by the refresh rate, or is that not true?

That is using FarCry as a benchmark, you asked about benchmarks for FarCry. If I misunderstood you, sorry.

Often games are used that have built in time demos (a loop that runs and reports the framerate), or the tester makes a custom time demo. FarCry does have a time demo mode, discussed here among other places. For games with no timedemo, you can use fraps


Google has lots about anti-aliasing, basically it is a technique to smooth the edges of images, but requires a lot of graphics processing, so it really can take a bite out of performance if you don't have a good vid card.

A "good" framerate is a playable framerate. That is often quoted as 30fps, but that can still look wrong, 45fps is better. (it will look smooth and very playable)

There's sort of two ways to think about fps. There are the fps that the card can render, and the fps you can see. The fps you can see is limited by the refresh rate of your monitor. If you have a sweet card that computationally is capable of rendering 200fps in UT, but your monitor can only do 75hz, then anything above 75fps is overkill, because the monitor can't refresh fast enough to show any more than 75 of the 200 frames that the video card can render. The benchmarks you see refer to the capabilities of the card, since that measures computational performance, but in real life, you won't see any difference between two cards if both can render more fps than your monitor refresh rate.

so THAT'S what the time demo is, lol, i never tried it. wow thanks a lot karsh44, you just cleared up a lot of stuff i was wondering about. i like the way you set up that post
i also read the link to hardware avenue that also cleared up some stuff. does powerstrip monitor gpu temps too or is it only for overclocking video cards? im thinking of doing this and lowering certain settings in the game to get some better performance in multiplayer. i think i used powerstrip for the 9200 i already returned, but it messed up a different game i was using i kept seeing little specs popping up, even when i was just in the menu, so i got rid of powerstrip but i feel confident now with my newer card and entire system, i think they can handle it