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 high, as this is the minimum to enable DirectX 10 mode, and tested at 1,280 x 1,024 and 1,680 x 1,050 with various anti-aliasing settings.

Anisotropic filtering was disabled in the driver control panel.








Switching to DirectX 10 in Far Cry 2 meant we had to bump the overall detail level up to high, and this meant frame rates dropped sharply. However, the HIS Radeon HD 4670 IceQ again failed to show any sign of an improvement in performance over the slightly slower stock card, and was again outperformed by 9600 GT. However, it is able to better the 9600 GSO, although it's worth remembering we tested a stock 9600 GSO, and many of these cards, such as the XFX GeForce 9600 GSO XXX, are sold very heavily overclocked.