Far Cry 2

Publisher: Ubisoft

Far Cry 2 is the latest first person shooter from Ubisoft and it's one of the most hotly-anticipated games of this year. While it continues the Far Cry franchise that Crytek started in 2004, Far Cry 2 is built on its own in-house engine and has no association to anything Crytek has worked on or is working on now.

The game uses DirectX 10.1 to improve anti-aliasing performance and quality. The improvements are made by reading the multisampled depth buffer in a single pass - something that was only introduced officially with DirectX 10.1. However, Ubisoft has also made the enhancements available to Nvidia hardware as well through a DirectX 10 extension.

We used the game's built-in benchmarking tool to measure performance in DirectX 10/10.1 mode - this provided a pretty accurate rundown of how various graphics cards perform and it shows off a lot of the game's special effects. We set every option to its maximum setting and tested at 1,280 x 1,024, 1,680 x 1,050 and 1,920 x 1,200 with various anti-aliasing settings.

Anisotropic filtering is controlled by the game's quality settings and forcing AF from the driver control panel does not have any effect on visual quality or performance.





There's a notable performance bump from the extra 512MB of memory in Far Cry 2 DX10, with the Gigabyte GeForce GTS 250 1GB comfortably outclassing the GTS 250 512MB, especially at 1,680 x 1,050 where the 1GB of GDDR3 allows for an improvement of over forty percent! However, competition from ATI is fierce, with both the bargain basement HD 4770 (with its huge fill rate) and the HD 4870 1GB posting superior benchmark scores.