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 1,680 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 effect on visual quality or performance.











CrossFire scales much better in DirectX 9.0 on the Radeon HD 4870 X2 and it has a clear lead over everything else we’ve tested here. Interestingly, CrossFire doesn’t scale on the Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2 though – that’s because we’re using a beta driver and we’re assuming this will be fixed by the time the card’s driver support gets official in January.

Aside from that, the GeForce GTX 260+ is arguably slightly better than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB and the 4870 512MB card doesn’t suffer as much as it did under Far Cry 2’s DirectX 10 mode. Interestingly, there’s a similar story with the GeForce 9800 GTX+ as well – at resolutions that matter (where performance is above the playability threshold), the Nvidia card is faster than the Radeon HD 4850 512MB.