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.











What’s interesting here is that the two dual-GPU Radeons are slower when anti-aliasing is disabled at all resolutions – they’re both CPU limited when you’re not using AA. Further evidence of this is that the Radeon HD 4870 1GB performs very similarly to the 4870 X2 without AA, but the former starts to fall back as soon as you turn enable anti-aliasing.

The GeForce GTX 280, for the most part, is slower than the Radeon HD 4850 X2 but has higher minimum frame rates in all tests at both 1,680 x 1,050 and 1,920 x 1,200. What’s interesting is that Nvidia’s flagship card manages to match the Radeon 4850 X2 at 2,560 x 1,600 with 4xAA enabled, but it’s a long way behind with only 2xAA.

Further down the pecking order is the battle between the Radeon HD 4870 1GB and the GeForce GTX 260+ – it’s generally quite a tightly-fought battle, but the Radeon just edges the GeForce out. The GeForce GTX 260+ is faster than the 4870 512MB though, as it runs out of memory pretty quickly – you can see the pretty incredible performance differences between the 512MB and 1GB versions of the 4870 for yourself. It’s almost a twofold performance increase in some scenarios.

Finally, the GeForce 9800 GTX+ is beaten fairly comprehensively by the Radeon HD 4850 512MB, but both of these cards start to shed performance pretty quickly. Above 1,680 x 1,050 2xAA or 1,920 x 1,200 0xAA, you’re going to struggle to achieve playability with the in-game settings at their highest levels.