Far Cry 2

Publisher: Ubisoft

Far Cry 2 is a first person shooter from Ubisoft and was one of the most hotly-anticipated games of 2008. 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.







Which card takes the performance crown in Far Cry 2 seems to rely on whether or not you enable anti aliasing, with the HD 4870 X2 leading when AA is disabled, and the GTX 295s producing a strong lead when it's switched on. As we like to play our games without eye gouging jaggies, we have to put this down as a win for the GTX 295, which at 1,680 x 1,050 with 4xAA is able to outperform the HD 4870 by more than fifteen percent. However, as with the rest of our tests, there's very little difference between the two GTX 295s, with the slight differences caused by minor differences in our benchmark runs.