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 1,280 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.








DirectX 9 was a similar story for the XFX ATI Radeon HD 4770 512MB where it was able to provide playable frame rates up to 1,920 x 1,200 but so long as we didn't enable AA. With AA enabled, we could only ramp up the resolution to 1,280 x 1,204 where we saw a minimum frame rate of 26fps.

As we've seen previously, benchmarking Far Cry 2 in DirectX 10 mode yielded faster results than in DirectX 9 so you'll have more headroom if you're running Vista or possibly Windows 7. Overall, the XFX ATI Radeon HD 4770 512MB was more than able to keep up with the more expensive Nvidia GeForce GTS 250 512MB and ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB.