I had already played the Far Cry demo on a friend's computer and I liked it, so I decided to give it a try on my machine.
AMD XP2600, 512DDR@333, GeForce4 MX (onboard).
But when I started it up I landed in the middle of this >
And no way to get a better display, no matter how I tweaked the setup. Even disabling write combination and lowering all the sliders for the nVidia drivers in Windows would not work. Stupid DirectX!
And with this demo you can't run in OpenGL it seems
Then I noticed that series of files in the Far Cry directory: XRenderD3D9.dll, XRenderNULL.dll, XRenderOGL.dll
well I just renamed XRenderOGL to XRenderD3D9 and I was able to get Far Cry to run in OpenGL with l33t graphics
I'm posting it here so that if others experience the same problem (fuckedup display) with the Far Cry demo that might be the solution for them too