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.








Far Cry 2 in DirectX 9.0 also clearly demonstrates the very real performance gains possible when you ramp a GPU's core clock speed up by close to 20 per cent, with huge gains over a stock HD 4890 1GB that make this card feel like it's running on an entirely different architecture. Again average frame rates are improved by around thirteen percent, with minimum frame rates receiving a similar boost. This jump places the Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 Atomic ahead of every other single GPU card at every resolution bar 2,560 x 1,600 with 4xAA.