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 10/10.1 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.









Far Cry 2 was a game full of strange results for us, which proves that the drivers are still in a pre-release state - a very good one, at that, we might add. They're stable, which should be the first concern in the run up to release and performance will follow. Here, we found that the GeForce GTX 295 was consistently slower than the GeForce GTX 260+ SLI configuration until we got up to 2,560 x 1,600, where it finally outperformed the dual-card setup at 0xAA, 2xAA and 4xAA.

We ran these numbers a multitude of times and couldn't get them to come out as we would have expected at lower resolutions.