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.








Just as in Fallout 3, the Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 1GB Atomic offers very significant improvements, with average frame rates up by between 13 and 14 per cent across the board and similar increases to minimum frame rates at all but 1,920 x 1,200. This, impressively puts the Atomic comfortably ahead of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 285 in all but the most demanding test at 2,560 x 1,600 with 4xAA and by quite significant margins - at 1,920 x 1,200 with 0xAA the Atomic holds a lead of a full 10fps on both average and minimum frame rates.