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.









Sapphire's ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2 delivers another impressive showing in Far Cry 2's DirectX 10 mode and the card is again much faster than the competition coming from Nvidia's GeForce GTX 285. The gap is interestingly smaller when anti-aliasing is enabled and since there's enough performance on tap anyway, that's something you'll want to enable in Far Cry 2.

At 1,920 x 1,200, for example, the Radeon HD 4850 X2 holds a 42 percent performance advantage over the Nvidia GeForce GTX 285; with 4xAA enabled that gap drops down to 23 percent. It's still a significant difference in favour of Sapphire's dual-GPU behemoth, but the 4850 X2's advantage is not as dominating as it first looks. Indeed, at 2,560 x 1,600 4xAA, the GeForce GTX 285 actually ekes out a 15 percent performance advantage.

This is a bit of a surprise and although it's a much smaller difference, it is at frame rates where there'll be a telling difference between the two configurations because the Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2's average dips under 30 frames per second. Moreover, the minimum frame rate is much higher on the GTX 285 as well - there's a 23 percent advantage in favour of Nvidia's single-GPU product.