driverheaven.net
Lets have a look at the patch that "never quite was". To get the full benefits of the patch you would have required an X800\X600 or X300 class graphics card, DirectX9.0b, FarCry 1.2 and Catalyst build 8.041 or above. If you have these you’ll get the full feature set: SM 2.0b and Geometry Instancing
The 2nd option is to have a R3xx or above graphics card (9500,9600,9700,9800) DirectX 9.0b, FarCry 1.2 and Catalyst 8.041. With this setup Geometry Instancing support is possible.
Thats right people, the NV40/SM3.0 isnt the only card/Shader Model that can provide instancing, any of ATI’s DX9 hardware supports this feature, in the words of some ATI employees (off the record) "even using DirectX9.0b"
We can give you rough indications of percentage increases - on the research map with Far Cry v1.2 \r_sm2bpath 1 and HLSL compiler profile 2.0b we saw increases of 13% at 1024x768, 21% at 1280x1024 and 25% at 1600x1200. Nothing to be sniffed at.