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.







The DirectX 9.0 mode in Far Cry 2 appears to change things a little, as the Radeon HD 4770 is no longer streets ahead of the cards around it. It’s still mostly faster than the GeForce GTS 250 though, barring a couple of exceptions at the lower end of the spectrum and 1,680 x 1,050 0xAA 16xAF appears to be the sweetspot for AMD’s new mid-range card. With anti-aliasing enabled, performance drops off very quickly on all of the cards tested here – the game benefits from more than 512MB of memory.