Originally posted by: Rollo
Originally posted by: JackBurton
That HDR X1800XT Crossfire preformace looks pretty dang good at 1600x1200 4XAA and 16xAF.
It does, but it's unfortunate they opted to only compare it to a version of SLI that will be out 6 months in a few days, and this version of Crossfire isn't even out yet. A real test would have been 512 GTX SLI vs 512 Crossfire, as those are the cards that both came out last month, and have the same amount of RAM, clocked much higher than was available way back in June.
Age is a non-factor, and prices are much closer these days between the 7800GTX and X1800XT; the 512MB GTX is rare and $750 a pop. While a comparison with the 512MB GTX would be nice to see, 512MB GTX is a very difficult setup to run these days, with both cost and availability limiting people's options tremendously.
Originally posted by: sodcha0s
Personally, I like the HL2 HDR better, much more realistic. The colors on the Farcry shots are oversaturated.
That's the look they went for, since Far Cry is already an extremely lush and over-the-top visual experience, HDR takes it a step further. Having played both HL2 HDR and Far Cry HDR extensively, the Far Cry implementation of HDR looks much better IMO. Far Cry is one of the only games to use true FP Blending HDR, which is AFAIK 64-bit internal colour rendering (mixed with the bloom effect, of course), unlike HL2 which is more of a clever algorithm that immitates HDR (plus bloom).
The one thing with Far Cry HDR the last I played it (the latest Far Cry patch, but not the unreleased new patch) is that it is still way overdone in some scenarios - even with lots of tweaking! Plus the performance hit is just huge; they are showing previews on an X1800XT because that's what it takes to get those kinds of framerates with HDR; my 7800GT went from 60-80 fps averages without HDR (1680X1050) to 30's with HDR.
Those screenshots look promising and hopefully show that Crytek has tweaked HDR to more believable levels; also hopefully they fixed the bugs with HDR (lights leaking through some walls in certain instances and Cryvision not working properly, to name a couple).