Far Cry was developed by the German Software producer Ubisoft. To this day, the program wows us with its realistic graphics.

As far as graphic quality goes, Far Cry is certainly one of the most advanced 3-D shooters. The price that has to be paid for such realism is the load put on the processor and graphics card.

Installation

Several patches are currently available for Far Cry. After installing the basic program from the DVD, patches 1.3 and 1.31 should be installed. Far Cry was not originally designed for benchmarks, but some utilities can be found on the Internet. We still use our own game scores and replay scripts. To run benchmarks, Far Cry has to be started in the '-devmode'.

'-devmode' has to be added to the command line.

Settings

Under 'Options » Video Options' a number of settings can be adjusted, including the resolution. We usually set it to 1280x1024x32.

Benchmarking

You can reload a previously saved game under 'Campaign » Load Check Point'; our game goes under the name 'cooler'. A flashlight can be activated by pressing the [L] button, in case you want the benchmark scene to be continuously illuminated.

Finally, you can open the test console by pressing [^]. The benchmark script can be started with '\demo cooler01'. Don't forget the backslash!

In contrast to other programs, Far Cry will run this script until it is interrupted by the user. Within the level index (in this case 'cooler') you'll find a log file that contains the results of each script run.

We recommend that you look on the Internet for datasets that are suitable for benchmarking. This is based on our hard-won experience that manufacturers like to match their drivers to popular benchmark settings in order to achieve higher performance. This is why we don't release our benchmark files.

This is what a typical benchmark result for Far Cry looks like.