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.

Tweaking the settings

Despite being both a console and a PC title, Far Cry 2 has a good range of controls for fine-tuning the in-game effects settings. The first three settings we experimented with were the Physics, Fire and Real Tree options at the top of the Display Settings panel.

However, none of these settings yielded a substantial performance increase when set to minimum and, as you might expect, turning them all down low made fires look a little less impressive, reducing the damage to tree models and grass. In short, if you have a half-decent graphics card, there's no reason to compromise with these settings.

Next, we looked at the HDR and Bloom lighting toggles at the bottom of the list. With both of these removed at 1,920 x 1,200 with 4x AA we saw a minimum frame rate of 25fps and an average of 31fps. This is a tiny improvement in speed, but the trade-off in quality was severe. Without HDR, the sun looked too clean, and with Bloom disabled, the result was a sun so clearly shaped, with such stark rays coming from it, that it looked like the sun on 'Teletubbies'. This is no good at all, unless you're hoping to catch Dipsy and La La hiding out in the brush.

However, working with broader strokes on the main scalable options produced some far more dramatic results than tinkering with the other switches. For example, using the default Low setting but switching bloom and HDR back on gave us an average frame rate of 67fps and a minimum of 30fps at 1,920 x 1,200 with 4x AA. This clearly indicates that your frame rates don't have to be CPU-limited, as you simply need to change the right settings.

It's worth noting that the graphics aren't even that bad at the Low settings with HDR and bloom enabled. If you use these settings at a decent resolution with some anti-aliasing, your game will certainly be prettier than Crysis on Low settings, and will play smoothly too.

Of the eight other settings, three have a significant effect on the frame rate: Shadows, Shaders and Geometry. Minimising or switching off any of these three big resource hogs will give you around 25 per cent more frames per second, with Shadows, Geometry and Shaders yielding minimum frame rates of 33fps, 32fps and 31fps respectively when turned down. The good news is that you can take a couple of bites out of the Shadows setting without substantially compromising the image quality. Geometry can be reduced too, although you'll notice the effects of this in clear or watery areas. However, we'd advise leaving the Shaders setting on full.

The Textures settings also have an effect on the frame rate, depending on how much RAM your graphics card has, although those of you with 512MB or more will have no problems using the Ultra Texture quality setting.

Meanwhile, the Ambient, Post, Vegetation and Terrain settings have a very small incremental effect on the frame rate, but the difference was so minimal that you can confidently push up these settings without worrying.