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 makes use of 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 - this provided a pretty accurate rundown of how various hardware performs and it shows off a lot of the game's special effects. We set every option to its maximum setting and tested at 1,680 x 1,050, 1,920 x 1,200 and 2,560 x 1,600 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 affect on visual quality or performance.











Strangely, both the Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2 and ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 are slower when anti-aliasing is disabled - it's as if they're CPU limited at even the highest resolutions until anti-aliasing is enabled, as performance increases once even 2xAA is turned on. Sapphire's card is faster than the GeForce GTX 280 at every setting with anti-aliasing turned on and since there's enough performance available, you'd be a fool not to enable AA.

Playability is there right up to 2,560 x 1,600 2xAA, which is exactly where the 4870 X2's playability threshold comes as well. The GTX 280 is marginally playable at these settings and 1,920 x 1,200 seems to be the best fit for Nvidia's flagship card.