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 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 Forceware driver we're using seem to be very poorly optimised for the GTX 285 in Far Cry 2 DX9, hence that card's poor performance. In regards to the iChill, we once again see minor improvements across the board, with larger improvements at 2,560x1,600 where the core and shader overclocks become more noticeable. Even then though, the improvement isn't earth shattering, and is still less than eight percent.