Far Cry 3 Tested, Benchmarked

Great test, as always Love that you split Very High and Ultra to show us what would happen if we lowered some settings in terms of playable frame rates. Very pretty game but I can't help but think this type of graphics should have been out 2-3 years ago. Yes, it does look better than Crysis 1, finally but it took 5 years to get there.

I am simply amazed at the going power of Core i7 920 though. Probably the best CPU in history. It's only 4 fps behind 8350 and just 10 fps behind i7-3770K. Core i7 920 D0s overclocked to 4.0-4.4ghz. Stunning CPU that still holds its own against modern CPU architectures. And console gamers say you need to upgrade your PC every 6 months. It seems it's all about the GPU in modern games as long as you pair it with some modern AMD/Intel CPU.

Looking forward to seeing how far Crysis 3, Tomb Raider and Metro Last Light push PC gaming graphics in 2013. It's about time we are starting to see better looking games.

Yes the 920 is an amazing chip I have a d0 on my desk that does 4ghz easily. I replaced it with a 970 that does 4Ghz at 1.24v

And my build is from Oct2009!!!
I'm pretty certain a 920 at 4Ghz will still be faster then the 8350 at 4 and 4.5Ghz!
All I need is to upgrade my 6970 to a 7970 and its right up their with SB , IVY.
O and great review as usual one of the things that keeps me coming back to the site.

lol I think we found a bigger fanboy than the other dude crying about the Nv 690 not being in the reviews. He was mad that the radeon Ghz edition was at the top of all the charts....

Lionvibez,

In fairness, the FX8350 is not going to hold anyone back in this game. People who have $800-1000 of GPUs aren't using $195 processors. For those with single HD7970Ghz/GTX680, those cards are choking at 1920x1200 maxed out as it is. Modern CPUs give way higher frames than the GPUs can manaage. It's pretty unbelievable that a game like FC3 crushes modern GPUs and yet it still doesn't look next generation, not even close actually. The textures and character models are still very simplistic. I have a feeling for truly next generation graphics, we'll need GPUs 5-10x more powerful as this isn't it. Next generation to me is like the New Dawn demo or Unreal Engine 4 or the Square Enix demo. I think we need GTX790 in SLI at minimum to manage next gen graphics if just marginal from Crysis 1, Metro 2033 and Witcher 2 seem to be killing GPUs.

Blue I agree when talking about playable frame rate.

Still kinda amazing how well Gen 1 i7 has been holding up.

Just one question
does it look better than crysis?

and
what about including some laptops in test?

(hitman absolution even more demanding than far cry 3 @ maxed settings..)
despite fc3 a gaming evolved title amd cards are bit behind than kepler counterparts..
I hope amd brings out another performance driver for far cry 3 similar as nv 2nd fc3 perf driver 310.70..

I inquired this on amd tech support yesterday,waiting what reply they will give..

but I am getting 60 fps vsync on in fc3 with 2500k+7950B+8 gb c.vengeance(everything on ULTRA,post fx medium,4xaa,ambience occlusion on SSAO) with no overclock on cpu/gpu with 12.11 beta 11 cap2

but nicely done bench...thankS

The beauty of HD7950 cards (boosted or non-boosted) is that they overclock like screamers. Give her a go Guest. You can net 20-25% overclock beyond 950mhz with a voltage bump up to 1.25V. Just be mindful of GPU and VRM temperatures. Let me know if you need help with MSI Afterburner unofficial unlock/voltage unlocking for your 7950 card.

This is the third time some Ahole has taken a stab at me on a performance review just because I wanted to see charts of the 690. Click on "Ultra" then tell me who is on top for every single resolution? I saw the 7990's performance on other sites, but since it was never released by AMD I understand that it wasn't ever included here. The 690, however, was officially released.

Did you read the graphs?

At 3.5GHz the i7 managed 70fps. At 4.5GHz it only managed 75fps. That's poor scalability. Very poor.

The FX gained 13fps within the same span. If you OC both by 500MHz the FX will do better than the i7.

If the performance was really bottlenecked by the GFX there shouldn't be a performance difference with the different clock speeds on the i7. But there is. A very tiny one compared to the great jumps in clock speed. That's poor scalability.

Come back once you sober up mate and can make sense of the numbers.

Hi,
Is this with SSAO, HBAO or HDAO? Because with 4x msaa with the latest drivers using gtx 680 on 1920x1080 and HDAO I get not as good average FPS as here, I got dips nearly all the time to 40-46..
What transparency AA? thx

Lol Jesper isn't it past your bed time?

Didnt' anyone teach you brand loyalty and making stuff up is for children and fanboys!

How does a 4Ghz 8350 only matching a 2.5Ghz i7 equal poor scaling for intel?

Funny thing is I wasn't even talking about you it was the other guy.

But thank you for showing the rest of us that you are in that same camp.

Link the post. I want to see if you're BSing me or if there actually is another person "in that same camp". Truth be told, I was an AMD guy, until BC2 and BF3 crashed every time I wanted to play the game. That's why when I upgraded, I got the 680 instead of the 7970.

I will go back and find the poster name later but I assure you it wasn't you. And lets use some logic here I play both BC2 and BF3 and been on a Radeon 6970 since launch and I had no crashing. So maybe the issue isn't the radeons and something else in your system.

You are going to have to make a better argument than one game crashing if you are trying to say the NV cards are more stable then the AMD cards in those two games.

Reminds me of one of my boys during the Windows XP era, whenever the system was unable he would just format and reinstall windows instead of trying to fix the problem.

So what trouble shooting did you so you can place the blame purely on the radeons?

You're making me sound like I have no idea what I'm doing. I tried everything to get my 6970 to work, but the card just would not play BC2 for longer than 20 minutes without crashing. I reseated the card, installed latest drivers, searched forums for fixes, and I even put the card into a different system with the same results. I was fine with BC2 crashing because at least I could play it for 20-30minutes, but BF3 didn't play longer than 3 minutes. That card was an "upgrade" from SLI 460s (temps entirely too high on a micro atx board). I never had these problems with my 460s. Maybe I was just unlucky and got a dead card. I have had absolutely zero problems with my 680. It's worked like a dream since I installed it back in July. I'm not an nvidia fanboy, I just want to see what the two monster cards can do (690/7990). It's nice seeing how games scale in sli and crossfire.

RMA