Moving on from the synthetics, we come to measures of real world gaming performance. Most games are built inside a shell called an "engine," and over the years new engines have evolved as graphic hardware has improved. Far Cry, which was developed with the Crytek engine, 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 card got a thorough workout. Far Cry also has HDR (High Dynamic Range) features, which helps test the effects of HDR code in testing. The hardware driver is set to Application controlled for AA and AF, Vertical Sync is disabled and the mipmap detail option is set to Quality.

The EVGA "Superclocked" model is able to beat all of the other cards in our tests. This means that the card can outperform the ATI Radeon X850XT PE even while performing additional tasks that the Shader Model 2.0b card cannot handle, such as HDR. The BFG is not far behind. It beats the ATI Radeon X800XT, but falls shy of the X850XT PE's frame speeds by a hair. But then again it is doing more work than the ATI card.