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.









The modest overclock on the Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 1GB Toxic gives it an advantage over the GeForce GTX 260-216 at 1,680 x 1,050 4xAA in Far Cry 2's DirectX 10 mode, where the reference Radeon HD 4870 1GB was three percent slower than the competition from Nvidia. At 1,920 x 1,200 4xAA where the Radeon HD 4870 1GB already had an advantage, the Toxic card merely extends the lead and starts to get quite close to the level of performance delivered by the GeForce GTX 280.