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.









The AA in Far Cry 2 in DX10/10.1 mode punishes the HD 4890 more than it does the GTX 275. At most resolutions (bar 2,560 x 1,600) the HD 4890 is faster than the GTX 275 if no AA is applied, but slower than the GTX 275 when we used 4x AA. As the two cards have roughly the same memory bandwidth (124.8GB/s for the HD 4890 and 127GB/s for the GTX 275) it looks like the GTX 275 GPU's ROPs are better optimised for AA in this game.