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.








The performance speaks for itself here - despite the 200MHz bump in memory speed and increase in memory bandwidth from 28.8GB/s to 32.2GB/sec, the only differences in performance between our original review sample 4670 and the HIS 4670 IceQ are caused by the slight differences in the Far Cry 2 benchmark - there's absolutely no advantage.

The 4670 doesn't come off too well in comparison to the competition either. The similarly priced Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT trumps it in every test, and even highly recommended cards from a year ago like the 9800 GT (that's an 8800 GT in disguise) able to produce playable frame rates even at 1,680 x 1,050 with 4xAA.