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 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 GeForce GTX 295 in Far Cry 2 rendered with DirectX 9 is pretty disappointing to be honest, with the card underperforming and producing lower results than a pair of GTX 260-216s. However, in comparison to the 4870 X2 performance it is still good, although ATI's dual GPU card is still able to edge the advantage in every single test, even if it is only by fractions of a frame per second.

The biggest disappointment here though was our Dual GTX 295 quad SLI configuration, which completely failed to work despite our best efforts. Nvidia is aware of the problems and there is a known performance bug with the 181.20 driver - hopefully Nvidia can fix this in a later driver before the launch. We're not that concerned about this particular problem (it should work, yes) though because if you're playing Far Cry 2, you'd want to be using DirectX 10 because it's not only faster but the image quality is also higher too.