The Crytek engine is just one of many, but Far Cry is a good game to tax the graphics card with textures, shading and lighting. We turned on the flashlight in our custom time demo, Cooler01, to make sure the cards got a thorough workout. Far Cry also has HDR (High Dynamic Range) which helps test the effects of HDR code in testing.

Something interesting surfaces in this benchmark, and a few others regarding SLI. Before, there was a gain associated with SLI in Far Cry, using the original 7800 GTX. But here you can see that the single 512 achieved the highest frame rates. This could be merely driver related - the driver is only a beta version - but it could also be signs of SLI overhead.

Once we move to the higher resolutions and features, SLI regains the 1st place spot.