Afternoon all, Was just reading on Tom's about AMD and CryTech releasing a patch for FarCry that takes advantage of WinXP-64 and the 64bit Athlons. Sounds great to me, read more about it here... I can easily understand the advantage for the physics side of the game, throwing bigger and badder CPU's at that sort of thing can only be a good thing [smile]. However, I'm a little bit more surprised about their claims about better graphics. The enhanced draw depth I can appreciate being due to more horsepower offsetting the loss of performance by a higher load on the GPU. Maybe a better algorithm has been implemented that creates a more aggressive LOD system - but for a straightforward patch I'd be surprised if they changed the main algorithms/architecture of the game. The high definition texturing has got me though - I'm really not sure how either 64bit extensions OR the extra horsepower can provide better textures: Regular 32bit Farcry Enanced 64bit Farcry Surely this is still going to be limited by the installed GPU - both by VRAM and by general performance. Sure, a 64bit CPU can address more system memory, but I don't really see that they're going to be using textures stored there [smile] Am I just being stupid and missing something? or does this claim seem a little odd to you? Cheers, Jack

It looks like a whole lot more than just a 'patch'.

Anyway, if a system has a PCI-express gfx card (for the 64-bit bus to the card) and the game is transfer speed limited, the you can theoretically double the transfer speed and transfer larger textures to the gfx card without affecting performance.

It looks like they added bumpmapping and/or parallax/displacement mapping to the ground textures. That would be your "better textures"

Quote:Original post by Grain
It’s a gimmick. To get people to buy 64 bit CPUs and shell out another $300 to MS. You don’t really NEED 64 bits for those textures. They just stuck the high-res textures in there to give the game a visibly noticeable change.

hehe, a bit cynical really [smile]

Of course its just a marketting gimmick - but thats why its distributed as an optional patch. Kind of like saying "here, have some new cool stuff if you have an AMD64" and at the same time saying "look at what AMD64 people get, like it? come buy our stuff".

I read an article in my PCZ magazine this morning about Valve/whoever publishing a load of new HL2 maps with the express intent of pushing the engine (and underlying hardware) to it's absolute limits. Probably for the same sorts of reasons - sell more Source licences and a whole load of nice new shiny GPU's [grin]

Quote:Original post by y2kiah
It looks like they added bumpmapping and/or parallax/displacement mapping to the ground textures. That would be your "better textures"

I concur - the official web page refers to them as "deeper textures" which supports this observation. However, I don't see anything AMD64 specific for it - that's all GPU-side stuff (SM2/SM3 cards) and a bit of extra art resources (iirc heightmaps instead of normal maps?)...

Quote:Original post by joanusdmentia
Anyway, if a system has a PCI-express gfx card (for the 64-bit bus to the card) and the game is transfer speed limited, the you can theoretically double the transfer speed and transfer larger textures to the gfx card without affecting performance.

hmm, see what you're getting at there... but is PCI-E that specific to the CPU? I could be wrong, but I thought PCI-E was PCI-E irrespective of an AMD/Intel/32bit/64bit chip. The only way that I see the CPU affecting the bus is maybe by the requirement on an underlying chipset/controller.


I have to admit, I was extremely tempted to buy into the Gf6x00 range when I first saw screens from the FarCry HDRI patch. I was always impressed with the FarCry engine (more so than I was with some of the "bigger name" engines) and HDRI just topped it all off [smile] Sadly a new AMD64 and GeForce 6800 system would require me to sell most of my possessions to finance it [sad]

Jack

'It looks like they added bumpmapping and/or parallax/displacement mapping to the ground textures. That would be your "better textures"'

exactly. But the thing is, those "better textures" look WORSE than the original ones. Just look at the beach scene.. horrible, just horrible. Definately not worth getting the 64-bit cpu.

Quote:Original post by jollyjeffers

Quote:Original post by joanusdmentia
Anyway, if a system has a PCI-express gfx card (for the 64-bit bus to the card) and the game is transfer speed limited, the you can theoretically double the transfer speed and transfer larger textures to the gfx card without affecting performance.

hmm, see what you're getting at there... but is PCI-E that specific to the CPU? I could be wrong, but I thought PCI-E was PCI-E irrespective of an AMD/Intel/32bit/64bit chip. The only way that I see the CPU affecting the bus is maybe by the requirement on an underlying chipset/controller.

Hmm, I was under the impression that PCI-E required a 64-bit bus....however I haven't really had much exposure to it so I could be totally wrong on that [smile]