One of the most often asked questions we receive is from people asking what video card they should buy. Gamers drool over the latest and greatest graphics cards and wonder if spending two or three times the price of a value model will translate into an equivalent performance boost. For well-equipped PCs running the latest games at maximum visual quality, the answer is a firm yes.

The Setup
For our experiment, we installed value and high-end graphics cards into two identically configured PCs. These were AMD64-based systems equipped with the powerful FX-53 processor, a gigabyte of fast DDR memory, and a pair of 74GB WD Raptor hard drives in RAID-0 configuration. Our game of choice for this showdown was Far Cry patched to v1.1. For the video cards, we used the latest publicly available drivers at the time this article was written. The control panel settings for each video card were left at default, and graphics quality settings were configured in-game.

The Cards
ATI and Nvidia-based cards continue to be the gamer's graphics hardware of choice. For our value selection, we went with eVGA's "e-GeForce FX 5700 Ultra". Sporting 128MB of speedy GDDR3 memory, eVGA's 5700 Ultra retails for about $180 online. Our high-end pick was ATI's "Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition" that retails online for just under $590—three times the cost of our value video card. This was certainly not a fair comparison, but our intention was to highlight the performance difference between value and high-end graphics cards.

Performance and Pictures
Far Cry is a seriously strenuous PC game, and our initial setup was configured for maximum image quality at 1280x1024. Anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering (AF) were set to maximum. Of course, we enabled Far Cry's "Ultra High" water quality setting for those sweet-looking reflections. In this relatively apples-to-apples comparison, the X800 XT PE managed about 62fps in our custom benchmark timedemo. The 5700 Ultra chugged along at about 17fps. If you like to play your games with all eye-candy enabled and at high resolutions, the extra cash spent on a high-end card would be a good investment.

We then dropped the in-game resolution to 1024x768 for both video cards and tweaked Far Cry's graphical settings so the GeForce 5700 Ultra maintained at least 50fps during our benchmark test. With our custom timedemo benchmark, we have found that 50fps translates into smooth gameplay throughout Far Cry's single-player missions.

Let's take a look at the visual sacrifices a value video card requires to achieve good performance in Far Cry.

The 5700 Ultra's use of moderate in-game settings in order to maintain decent performance resulted in decreased water and, to a lesser extent, texture detail.

The barrels in this scene are being illuminated with the flashlight. For the 5700 Ultra, slightly decreasing the in-game lighting quality introduces rendering errors with obvious banding seen in the reflected light.

This screen capture highlights the water and lighting differences between the two cards. Keep in mind the X800 XT is at maximum quality and the 5700 Ultra has been tweaked to maintain good performance.

Here again we see difference between Far Cry's "Ultra High" water setting and anything less. Also, the decreased lighting quality used with the 5700 Ultra becomes quite apparent in this comparison.