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.









With anti-aliasing enabled in Far Cry 2, there is very little to choose between the Radeon HD 4870 1GB and GeForce GTX 260+ - you're talking a frame per second either way in almost every test, which you're not going to notice in the real world. The same is true with SLI vs. CrossFire, although generally speaking the GTX 260+ SLI configuration has a slight edge over the 4870 1GB CrossFire setup when AA is turned on.

What's interesting is that, despite having the same clock speeds as the Radeon HD 4870 X2, the 4870 1GB CrossFire configuration actually appears to be slightly faster in our testing, although minimum frame rates are generally pretty similar.