Far Cry: How it runs on a 2003 PC — AMD Athlon 64 3200+ / ATi Radeon 9800 XT / Audigy 2

REAL HARDWARE CAPTURE IN 4:3 ASPECT RATIO. Commentary subtitles are available [but being worked on]!

Here is one of the juggernauts of early 2004; Crytek's very first game, Far Cry (Ubisoft/Crytek, March 2004) being made to run on a late 2003/early 2004 PC. The purpose of the video is to give an idea of how the game performs on this PC using the original DVD-ROM retail version (1.0) without any patches installed.

Far Cry features the overwhelming majority of technical bells and whistles expected from an early DirectX 9.0 game with extensive Shader Language code usage (Pixel & Vertex Shader model 1.1/1.4 and 2.0 to a lesser extent). It’s a game dressed in all manner of multi-texture effects (Normal Mapping, Environment-mapped Bump Mapping (EMBM), Cube Mapping, Gloss Mapping etc.), healthy amounts of projected textures (for ceiling lights and canopy shadows), along with real-time/active Shadow Mapping and stencil-buffered shadows (shadow volumes) casting from characters and objects. That's not even mentioning the render-to-texture reflection buffers, EMBM and refractions on the nice-looking water surfaces found throughout the game. It's quite the feature list!

... But, it begs the question; how does it all run?
I dare say that it runs quite well, with everything considered. Sure, it can slow down pretty hard at times but it's more often a case of you having to go out of your way to make it struggle rather than the game REALLY struggling across the board. Zoom in on a crowded location with your binoculars and you might get a nasty performance dip but these situations often aren't speed-critical. Whenever the game does serve you an exceptionally large-scale and/or visually busy environment, it gives you plenty of space to approach with care and get a drop on enemies well before a gunfight breaks out. More often than not, I find that the game's approach to combining real-time shadow maps and stencil shadows on characters to be a greater source of strain in action-heavy scenarios than the environmental details. Going from Medium to High quality lighting detail has a noticeable performance impact across the board!

- - GAME SETTINGS - -
The graphical settings are at their maximum presets (without any advanced tweaking in the Far Cry Configuration Tool), with the exception of anti-aliasing which is set to OFF (Anisotropic texture filtering maxes out at x4 in the menu but it can be increased through other means, although there is little to be gained from going above x4 at this resolution, in my opinion).

Vertical Sync was turned off, meaning that you might observe a lot of torn frames in the footage. Let me know if you want me to try V. Sync for future captures! I try to avoid using V. Sync if it's too aggressive (i.e. it rounds down to nearest multiple of 30hz).

The sound settings have hardware mixing and EAX both enabled.

- - SYSTEM SPECIFICATIONS - -
Operating system: Microsoft Windows XP SP3.
Drivers for Radeon 9800 XT: Catalyst 4.3 (around March 10th 2004).
Drivers for Sound Blaster Audigy 2: EAX 4.0 drivers (October 31st 2003, from file sba2_eax4drv_031031.exe).

This footage and audio was captured from the following computer:
- MSI K8T Neo (MS-6702, Ver 1.0) motherboard (manufactured August/September 2003).
- AMD Athlon 64 3200+ processor (manufactured week 33 2003, as marked on heatspreader).
- VIA K8T800 chipset.
- ATi Radeon 9800XT (256 MB) video card (manufactured week 42 2003 according to serial number sticker).
- Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy 2 (SB0240) sound card (manufactured in 2002 or 2003, don't remember exactly when).
- 1 GB of DDR SDRAM; Corsair XMS Pro TwinX1024-3200C2PRO (2x512MB, manufactured week 40 2003), clock speed is DDR400 & latency is 2-3-3-6.

The capturing was done with VCS (which can be found on the Internet Archive) and OBS Studio using a Datapath VisionRGB-E1S PCI-Express capture card. A DVI cable is connected between the source computer and the Datapath capture card to enable video capturing. Audio capture was done by feeding a 3.5mm stereo jack cable from the sound card of the vintage computer to the capture system’s on-board line in connector. Resizing/upscaling of the raw original 1024x768 capture to 3072x2304 was done using VirtualDub2.

TIMESTAMPS
0:00 - Training
2:11 - Carrier
3:44 - Fort
7:52 - Pier
10:16 - Research (water pumping facility)
12:03 - Treehouse
13:54 - Steam
15:23 - Control
17:42 - Boat

#farcry1 #crytek #windowsxp #ati #audigy2 #soundblaster #eax #periodcorrect #athlon64 #amd #fraps #datapath #upscaling #visionrgb #radeon #9800XT

Дата на публикация: 11 юли, 2025
Категория: Игри
Ключови думи: Cry On Far it How runs pc 2003 64 ati xt AMD Radeon Athlon 9800 3200+ Audigy