The Fermi Thread - Part 3

[GoldenTiger]

I'll tell you something about Far Cry 2 benchmarking.

Both ATI and NVIDIA have built in FAR too many optimizations into their drivers for the standard "Ranch" benchmark runs. That's why we avoid it like the plague. Our results are based off of a 10 minute gameplay sequence. The "Ranch"-based benchmarks used to be quite accurate....not anymore.

The game itself is currently somewhat ATI-biased simply because their drivers have improved Dunia Engine performance drastically.

Since we don't know where those benchmarks are taken from within the game (Ranch sequence or in-game), it's best to take that with a grain of salt.

HOWEVER, for NVIDIA to be performing that well in DiRT 2 (a game developed with the close participation of AMD) is a huge step in the right direction.

Good points... I had the same thought on Dirt 2 myself.

well avgs are low so i bet they again picked 2560 res for bench which can explain 480s nice performance in dx11

I run 2560x1600, so to me it is extremely important that a high-end card can perform at high-res. As far as the avg's being "low", the minimums are important to me, in fact what drove me to buy a 5870 over my then-current GTX 280 even though the averages weren't as spectacularly high like the minimum gains were. As SKYMTL said of course, can't really judge a ton off of the FarCry 2 bench there without context, but if minimum gains like that turn out to be the norm in real benches across review sites, then it would be a smashing success of a card: I don't care if it can spike to 150fps while maintaining a 60 average... I care if it can stay above 45-50 while maintaining a 65-70 average, even if that means the max is only around 100 then . Max framerates and by extension averages can be easily skewed with that.