The Far Cry 1.2 patch should hopefully be officially available for download today as we were informed that July 02 is the date. The only GPU that supports Pixel Shader 3.0 which is a part of this new patch is nVidia’s 6800 line. Besides the patch, you will also need to update drivers with Pixel Shader 3.0 support which should also be releasing today. As soon as we get the green light, we’ll post these files in our forums in this thread.

In the meantime, lets show you some of the improvements that Pixel Shader 3.0 brings with itself. The screenshot below shows Far Cry with PS 3.0- and it sure makes you remind of the difference we saw when we first installed the Voodoo card:

Yes- we’re just kidding. Pixel Shader will bring some visual improvements but nothing drastic at the moment. From what we've learnt, the current patch focuses more on performance improvements for SM3.0 than visual quality- apparently, there is a leaked patch that improves visuals as well but we havent had a chance to play with it. The following IS an actual shot of Far Cry with Pixel Shader 3.0 using the patch we've used for benchmarking. The thumbnail is jpeg so you might want to click on it for the bmp version without any compression.

With the new patch and drivers, you can enable Pixel Shader 3.0 in Far Cry for the 6800 series of cards running the game in DEVMODE (FarCry.exe –DEVMODE) and typing r_SM30PATH 1 in the console. You can do this dynamically within the game. The “SM30 Path” appears as a legend in yellow on the top as shown in the screenshot above.

The following is the testbed we used for benchmarking Far Cry with Pixel Shader 2.0 and 3.0

We benchmarked four levels in Far Cry- Regulator, Research, Training and Volcano. All of these levels were benchmarked at 1024x768, 1600x1200 and 1024x768/4X AA + 8X AF resolutions. Lets see what we found out: