This is a pretty crazy development, imo. A game developer working with a graphics card company after the game's initial release to include more functionality that's only present on one graphics card company's product? Strangeness. However, very cool that SM3.0's actually being used. I can't wait to see the screenies from this one...

"The game's publishers, Ubisoft, have worked with NVIDIA to make the game use the Shader Model 3.0 capabilities built into the GeForce 6800 series graphics cards. The version 1.2 patch for Far Cry should be released soon for all the world to see. NVIDIA supplied us with an early copy of the patch a few days back so we could test Far Cry performance using Shader Model 3.0. Read on to see how the new patch performs with Shader Model 3.0, and how the GeForce 6800 series now compares to the Radeon X800 lineup."