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.








What’s interesting about Far Cry 2 is that it appears to be fillrate limited when anti-aliasing isn’t enabled because the Radeon HD 4770 manages to trump the slightly faster Radeon HD 4850 by quite a margin in some circumstances. We were initially very sceptical about these results and ended up re-running the whole suite on all cards a couple more times just to be sure.

The 20 percent pixel fillrate advantage is coming into play here we feel, as the 4770’s theoretical throughput is just four percent lower than the 4850’s. Meanwhile, the GeForce GTS 250 trails slightly behind the Radeon HD 4850 in most of the tests, but it’s not by an amount that’d ever make a real difference to the gaming experience. Finally, the GeForce 9800 GT festers around the Radeon HD 4830’s level of performance and for the most part it’s slower than AMD’s outgoing part.