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 1,280 x 1,024, 1,680 x 1,050 and 1,920 x 1,200 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 XFX ATI Radeon HD 4770 512MB put in an impressive performance in Far Cry 2 DX10 mode although it really didn't like it when we turned AA on. Without it, even 1,920 x 1,200 was stutter free, but with AA enabled, only 1,280 x 1,024 with 2xAA was smooth enough to deem playable. Even so, the more expensive ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB and Nvidia GeForce GTS 250 512MB were put to shame by this much cheaper graphics card.

There was a glitch at 1,280 x 1,024 2xAA though where the XFX ATI Radeon HD 4770 512MB's minimum frame rate refused to go above 26fps while both the other HD 4770s managed minimum frame rates well into the 30s. We ran the benchmark several times but each time returned the same result. At all other resolutions, it was similar to or identical to the other HD 4770s.