Graphics Analysis

For once, we’re going to kind of gloss over the graphics – not because they aren’t impressive, but because Tim and Harry will be looking at them more closely later. Soon we’ll have an indepth set of performance benchmarks and graphics analysis for Far Cry 2.

If you find yourself asking; will my computer or graphics card run Far Cry 2? Then you’ll soon have an answer.

For now, we’re just going to look at the three standard presets for the game to check out what it looks like on the various different settings. Below you can see what the game looks like on Ultra High, High and Low presets, but we’ve skipped out on Very High and Medium.

Far Cry 2 is an impressive game graphically and it has all sorts of effects and tricks. The fire in the game is especially good-looking, more so because it can spread out across the land in a believable way if you use it right. A well placed Molotov cocktail can make a wall of flames than can effectively fence in an enemy and destroy or cut them off from their vehicles.


The game also has a full day and night cycle which passes as you play, meaning that you can watch the stars and moon rise if you like and then use the cover of darkness to hide your stealthy, backstabbing game tactics. Though time passes quite slowly in game, you can also find beds to rest on and fast forward to your desired point in the timeline.

On top of all that the game is also the first to use DirectX 10.1, which is used to give better anti-aliasing performance. Yes, we know that Assassin’s Creed PC also used DX 10.1, but that was removed in a subsequent patch. Far Cry 2 is the first game to retain the use of DX10.1, though you’ll have to pump up the settings and be running Vista Service Pack 1 to make use of it. The enhancements even work on Nvidia graphics cards through a DirectX 10 extension.


If you’re worried about how the game might run on your system too, then there’s no real need to be. The game doesn’t require massively powerful specs and the minimums list only 1GB of RAM and a Shader Model 3.0 graphics card with 256MB. The recommended specs are just a bit higher – 2GB of RAM and a card with 512MB. You can check out the full set of minimum and recommended system specs for Far Cry 2 here if you need more info.

For our part, we ran the game on Ultra-high settings at 1,920 x 1,200 with 2.93GHz CPU, 3.50GB of accessible RAM (thanks to 32-bit Vista) and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 and the performance never dropped below thirty frames a second. Not once. That’s impressive when you bear in mind that there are no load screens in the game as you roam through the 50 square kilometres.


To be honest though, even if you’re running the game on the High settings and not the Ultra-high then the game is still going to look great. You might be sacrificing some slightly tweaked AA performance that you wouldn’t notice anyway, but ho-hum. As you can see in the screenshots on this page, the game still looks great on the High setting and that’s a setting which most systems nowadays should be able to hit.

In fact, from the screenshots it’s hard to tell the difference between High and Ultra-high. In motion the difference is a little easier to spot thanks to the motion blur, depth of field and so on, but those settings are all pretty extraneous anyway. Good if you can get them, but not worth fretting over.

On the Low setting, things are a bit different. The game is still OK looking to anyone who doesn’t demand the best of graphics, but it’s definitely a few steps lower than you might hope. The textures are less detailed, more flat and not as interesting. There’s a lot more pop-up too as you roam the game world and the lack of shadows massively impacts on how the game looks. While the Low setting may be tolerable, you certainly aren’t making the most of what the game has to offer.