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.








In Far Cry 2 DX9 mode, the MSI GTX 285 HydroGen OC walked all over the stock speed card in a few resolutions, so at last we're seeing some value for money. The results were noticeable immediately where at 1,680 x 1,050 0xAA, the MSI GTX 285 HydroGen OC managed a minimum frame rate of 46fps while the stock GTX 285 could only muster 41fps. This might not sound like a lot but when we're talking about percentages that's an 11% speed boost; and this kind of gap is present across the board.

We saw a similar result with the Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 1GB Atomic which, thanks to enhanced clock speeds, was much faster than the stock speed HD 4890. As far as playable frame rates go, the MSI GTX 285 HydroGen OC went as far as 2,560 x 1,600 0xAA where it managed a minimum frame rate of 35fps. Only at 2,560 x 1,600 4xAA did the frame rate dip far enough to be deemed unplayable where it recorded a minimum frame rate of 18fps.