Tweak the graphics options in Far Cry 2

If your system is struggling to play Far Cry 2 with a smooth frame rate, Phil Hartup has the remedy for your stuttering graphics.

Far Cry 2 is a sneaky title for this game, as it has practically nothing whatsoever to do with the original. It doesn't use the same engine and was made by completely different people. One feature that Far Cry and Far Cry 2 do have in common is the spectacular visuals, but even in this aspect, there's one major difference. Far Cry 2 takes us away from Far Cry's Paradise Island, with its cool blue seas, lush forests and rusted wartime relics, to Africa, home of mud, dust, rust and fire. Based on the purpose-built Dunia engine, Far Cry 2 combines wide-area fighting with intensely atmospheric locations. It can be hard work for some PCs, but you can get the game to run smoothly with a little tweaking.

The challenges that Far Cry 2 throws at your system come from several directions, but in many ways, the developer has held back from really sticking the knife in. For example, the character models for the enemies are very detailed and realistically animated, but once you start shooting at them you'll see that, apart from the initial splatter of blood from a bullet impact, the bodies are left unmarked. This lack of damage decals saves resources, and unless you're sitting really close to the screen, or playing Fallout 3 has given you a taste for exploding heads, you don't notice it. More difficult for your PC, however, are the effects that arise when the action heats up.

A fine example is a brush fire, which can burn up your frame rate as quickly as it burns up your surroundings. Testing with a Zotac GeForce GTX 280 graphics card at stock speeds at 1,920 x 1,200, we measured a 90-second frame rate count in the game, one with a brush fire and one without, in the same part of the game. With the bush fire, we saw the minimum frame rate drop from 29fps to 23fps, and that's with Nvidia's flagship graphics card and no enemies firing at us. This shows how important it is to make sure your graphic settings are correct, as you also need to keep some reserve frame-rate power in the bank, so that you aren't suddenly plunged into a sideshow when combat breaks out.

Resolutions and anti-aliasing

To test performance, we set up a repeatable benchmark (separate from the one mentioned above) and started by using the maximum settings at 1,920 x 1,200 with 4x anti aliasing. At these settings, the average frame rate was 28fps with a minimum of 24fps. While the average is fine and the minimum isn't bad, it's obviously cutting it very fine, and it will be much harder work for anyone with lower-spec graphics cards.

The next step was to try the same settings at 1,680 x 1,050. While this may seem like a small adjustment, it dramatically reduces the pixel area of the screen and the amount of anti-aliasing work involved. In this case, it yielded an average of 31fps and a minimum of 26fps. This is a little shy of a 10 per cent performance hike for only a minor reduction in graphical quality.

Meanwhile, switching off anti-aliasing yielded a much greater performance boost, increasing the frame rate to an average of 36fps and a minimum of 30fps at 1,920 x 1,200, and an average of 38fps and minimum of 31fps at 1,680 x 1,050. We also tried benchmarking the game at 1,280 x 1,024 without anti-aliasing, which again gave us an average of 38fps and a minimum of 31fps, showing that at this point the CPU was starting to limit the game. In fact, even running the game at a horrific resolution of 320 x 200 without anti-aliasing yielded a minimum of only 34fps, so dropping the resolution and anti-aliasing produces diminishing returns when using a top-end graphics card.