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 medium quality and tested at 1,280 x 1,024 and 1,680 x 1,050 with various anti-aliasing settings.

We left anisotropic filtering disabled in the driver control panel.








Switching down to DirectX 9 sees the XFX GeForce 9800 GT 512MB XXX Edition overclock create a bigger gap between it and the stock card. While at 1,280 x 1,024, the advantage is only one frame per second at 0xAA and 2xAA, upping it to 4xAA sees the performance advantage widen to over two frames per second, and at 1,680 x 1,050 the overclocked 9800 GT is able to stretch the improvement to over three frames per second.