I'm a new convert of HDR

[Mochan]

Okay, I was never really big into HDR before, sure it looked good but it wasn't something I was looking for, or looking forward to.

But when I popped in Far Cry, installed Patch v1.33 and got the HDR, I was, WOW. By far the best HDR effects I've seen. It looks drop dead gorgeous! The HDR works really well in Far Cry's tropical jungles and produces a very convincing sensation that you are on a sunny tropical island. Far and away these graphics blow away Doom 3 or Quake 4. I just fell in love with this game all over again.

Now I'm looking forward to playing Oblivion with all the HDR eye candy. =_= Dunno if hte effect will be as nice as it was in Far Cry but we shall see.

My only complaint is that Far Cry's HDR doesn't work with AA for NVidia cards. That kinda sucks, but I think I'll trade in the AA for HDR in this play through. It just looks so damn gorgeous.

[moya]

Have you tried the Half-Life Lost Coast demo level? Some nice HDR on that, too.

[Robert-The-Rambler]

Okay, I was never really big into HDR before, sure it looked good but it wasn't something I was looking for, or looking forward to.

But when I popped in Far Cry, installed Patch v1.33 and got the HDR, I was, WOW. By far the best HDR effects I've seen. It looks drop dead gorgeous! The HDR works really well in Far Cry's tropical jungles and produces a very convincing sensation that you are on a sunny tropical island. Far and away these graphics blow away Doom 3 or Quake 4. I just fell in love with this game all over again.

Now I'm looking forward to playing Oblivion with all the HDR eye candy. =_= Dunno if hte effect will be as nice as it was in Far Cry but we shall see.

My only complaint is that Far Cry's HDR doesn't work with AA for NVidia cards. That kinda sucks, but I think I'll trade in the AA for HDR in this play through. It just looks so damn gorgeous.

I love playing Farcry just to look at the flowing water. It looks friggin awesome with the light reflecting off it.(Then the bastards start shooting) BTW, I can push the game and play smooth at 1600 * 1200 max detail with 16x high quality anisotropic filtering with my X1600 crossfire rig. (Framerate is not more than 35 - 45 frames though with all the goodies)

At high res FSAA is not that important anyway. So all hail HDR. It is very good in Half-Life 2, too.

[Mochan]

Yeah, I finished Lost Coast already. IMO Far Cry's implementation blows Lost Coast away completely. The only plus Lost Coast has over Far Cry is that AA works without a hitch with its HDR.

I push Far Cry to it smax settings on my PC at 1280x1024 (can't go higher than that) and I get around 60fps except in certain outdoor spots where it chugs down to around 40, and I get some odd hiccups here and there. A bit disappointing but the kind of eyecandy you get is insane. Sometimes I wish I had a SLI 7800GT; for all the trash I talk on SLI it seems to be the solution to gaming at high-res.

[Robert-The-Rambler]

Yeah, I finished Lost Coast already. IMO Far Cry's implementation blows Lost Coast away completely. The only plus Lost Coast has over Far Cry is that AA works without a hitch with its HDR.

I push Far Cry to it smax settings on my PC at 1280x1024 (can't go higher than that) and I get around 60fps except in certain outdoor spots where it chugs down to around 40, and I get some odd hiccups here and there. A bit disappointing but the kind of eyecandy you get is insane. Sometimes I wish I had a SLI 7800GT; for all the trash I talk on SLI it seems to be the solution to gaming at high-res.

I don't know about the percentage increase from crossfire across the board but in 3D Mark 2006 there seems to be near 100% gains in some of the tests. A multi GPU setup surely yields tangible results but the pitfall of the idea is that over time a single card will come out that does the same thing faster making the prior multi GPU setups obsolete for even less money. (Remember the Voodoo2s?) For example, the Radeon X1900 is probably more powerful than 2 X1800s and is cheaper at about $600 compared to somewhere around $1000 for two X1800s.
Financially multi GPUs do not make sense in the long run in a lot of cases but from a performance standpoint I guess it is worth it if cost is not a factor and you want the fastest thing right now. For me, two 1600XTs perform about as well as a single 1800xl so financially it didn't matter and Super AA(Only available from crossfire) really works wonders for older games like Halo) Heed my advice, patience will yield results.

[Mochan]

Yeah, that has always been my argument against sli/crossfire. A new card later on will come out with the same kind of performance in single.

I think though that there are areas where a dual card setup will do better: increasing resolution and maybe in certain effects like heavy shader tasks. After all, if you are running your game at 1600x1200, having a sli setup means you are basically running the game in 800x600. This is the biggest advantage of a dual card setup, I think. Dual setups also help share the load between the vertex and pixel shaders to avoid bottlenecks, meaning you can probably enable more details with better results even against a more powerful card (unless that card simply has more raw shader power). But I think the area you will easily see the most improvement in is when you increase the resolution (that is... it allows you to use higher resolutions since you are effectively working at half the resolution).