Originally posted by: Randum
how do you enable HDR on farcry?
Go to the command line (hit ~) and type: \r_hdrrendering X
where X is a number between 1 and 9 . 7 is the most popular one; it's the 'bloom' effect. The difference is minimal, but 7 is generally accepted as the best looking.
Note that you need to have an Nvidia card with Shader Model 3.0 (it's not really the SM 3 that does it, but all SM 3 Nvidia cards also are capable of 16-bit OpenEXR HDR rendering, which is what Far Cry uses).
If that X850XT is what you've got then sadly you're out of luck. I had to get a GeForce 6600GT to test it out myself (not a good idea, btw. HDR Performs like a dog on a 6600GT ).
Half Life 2 uses a different form of HDR that ATI's SM 2.0 cards do as well. There was actually a Far Cry demo benchmark that ran in HDR that worked fine on ATI cards... Sadly, they chose to go with Nvidia-exclusive (for the time being) OpenEXR HDR for the full version of the game.