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 9.0 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.









Switching to DX9 mode shows much the same story as Far Cry 2 in DX 10.1 mode, with the two HD 4870 cards matched for performance no matter how much memory each card had.

At every resolution the GTX 275 clearly outpaced the Sapphire Vapor-X. Picking two resolutions at random we see the GTX 275 scored a minimum of 36fps and an average of 42.3fps at 1,680 x 1,050 with 4x AA while the Vapor-X only produced a minimum of 29fps and an average of 33.8fps; at 25,60 x 1,600 with no AA the game ran at a minimum of 31fps and an average of 38fps compared to the 26fps minimum and 30.4fps average of the Vapor-X.

You might still be tempted to go for the Vapor-X as it can still play the game smoothly at this high resolution and is significantly quieter than the GTX 275, but the extra performance of the GTX 275 and the fact that it's not horrendously loud means that we'd go for the GTX 275.