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.









Far Cry 2 in DX10.1 mode is another game that doesn't make use of the extra 1GB of video memory - at every resolution the Sapphire Vapor-X was matched for speed by the 1GB HD 4870. Worse still, the GeForce GTX 275 was much faster than either card except for two bogey resolutions - 1,680 x 1,060 with no AA and 1,920 x 1,200 with no AA. Nvidia's ForceWare 185.62 beta driver (the preferred driver, at time of writing) is clearly not quite as consistent as Nvidia makes out.

As an aside, we're told that no performance improvements have been from ForceWare 185.62 beta to the 185.68 beta driver that's the most current on Nvidia's site.