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 1,680 x 1,050, 1,920 x 1,200 and 2,560 x 1,600 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.











Gigabyte's Radeon HD 4850 1GB starts off well in Far Cry 2, where it edges ahead of even the Radeon HD 4870 512MB in many scenarios - the additional memory appears to be paying dividends in this particular title. Despite this though, it didn't afford us a higher playable resolution or AA setting than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB - both cards are playable at a maximum of 1,920 x 1,200 2xAA with maximum quality - but we did find that the frame rates were smoother.

1,920 x 1,200 with 4xAA is just too much for a Radeon HD 4850, regardless of how much memory it has on board. At 1,680 x 1,050 though, there was a difference in maximum playable settings, as there was enough spare performance available on Gigabyte's Radeon HD 4850 1GB for us to enable 4xAA without too much trouble.