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 mixed bag for the GeForce GTX 295, demonstrating performance which is, for the most part, identical to an SLI GTX 260-216 configuration. While performance without anti aliasing at 1,680 x 1,050 is somewhat disappointing and clearly slower than a Radeon HD 4870 X2, turning on anti aliasing sees the GTX 295 overtake the 4870 X2 until we reach 2,560 x 1,600, when the 4870 X2 has the advantage at 0xAA, the GTX 295 the advantage at 4xAA and both perform very similarly at 2xAA.

While this might look like a hit for the GTX 295 though, it's nothing of the sort - who would want to play modern games on such expensive hardware and leave anti-aliasing turned off?

Looking to Multi GPU performance it's a much clearer picture, with SLI GeForce GTX 295s dominating CrossFire 4870 X2s in every single test, no matter the resolution or AA setting - a clear victory for SLI here.