Investigations into Socket 939 Athlon 64 Overclocking

Far Cry Performance

Far Cry remains one of the more graphically intense games, and it gives a somewhat different performance picture between ATI and NVIDIA than Doom 3 and Half-Life 2. We tested with the 1.33 patch installed, though we didn't attempt to force HDR or instancing. We ran the standard Ubisoft benchmarks for the Regulator, Research, Training, and Volcano levels. We then averaged the results across these four benchmarks to come up with the final score. If you'd prefer to see the performance on the individual levels, you can download the 18 graphs in a Zip file. We tested with everything - including water - set to Very High quality. (Remember, this is a CPU overclocking article, not a GPU performance article.)

Going from 640x480 through 1024x768, we gain 41%, 29%, and 13%. As with Doom 3, adding antialiasing into the mix at 1024x768 really stresses the GPU, limiting performance gains to 5%. As we mentioned in our latest Mid-Range Guide, gamers are much better off getting a slower CPU with a faster GPU rather than the other way around. With some judicious overclocking, even the slowest Athlon 64 Venice part can achieve great performance with the right GPU. We should mention that we haven't shown results for 640x480 4xAA and 800x600 4xAA on any of the games for a reason: if you can't run at 1024x768 resolution or higher, you probably can't run 4xAA well either. We would definitely increase resolution at least to 1024x768 before worrying about antialiasing.

The trend of more expensive RAM realizing higher scores continues, as expected. This time, the gap grows to as much as 9%, indicating that Far Cry is slightly more demanding of the memory subsystem than other games. The 2T timing at 9x300 really kills performance, coming in 15% slower than 9x300 OCZ RAM. If you opt for the Venice 3000+ chip, you might want to spend a bit extra for 2-3-2 RAM as opposed to 2.5-3-3 RAM. The extra $15 or so should bring up performance at 9x300 substantially.