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.









Far Cry 2 is a game where performance between the Radeon HD 4870 1GB and GeForce GTX 260-216 is fairly evenly matched - at 1,680 x 1,050, the GeForce GTX 260-216 has a slight edge when 4xAA is applied, while the Radeon HD 4870 1GB has the advantage at 1,920 x 1,200 4xAA.

The increased clock speeds on the HIS ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB IceQ4+ Turbo affords a three percent performance improvement at 1,680 x 1,050 4xAA - enough to extinguish any advantage the GeForce GTX 260-216 had at these settings. At 1,920 x 1,200 4xAA, the higher frequencies equate to a four percent frame rate increase and that means the 4870 1GB IceQ4+ Turbo extends the lead over the GTX 260-216 to a little over seven percent.