If we look at a poll I started a couple of weeks ago, the biggest anticipated gaming title of this season voted by you guys is .. Far Cry 2. That's probably the reason why Ubisoft last week shipped out the game to us, and also the reason why NVIDIA is going to start bundling the game with their high-end cards in some regions.

So the game arrives by mail, I open it up .. and carefully in a totally non-gay way shout "yay". So I rip open the packaging, insert the DVD, start installing and when I startup the game the copy protection shows a really big figurative middle finger at me. Shit, the title can be activated on the 21st of October only. The agony !

It's actually a good thing I waited though as the 20th of October 2008 that really familiar "poing" sound of the mailbox is going off, twice, pretty much simultaniously.

An email from NVIDIA, dude we have a new driver available for the Far Cry release.
Second email is from ATI, dude we have a new driver available for the Far Cry release.

So that's the stage where things get interesting. If chipset manufacturers themselves start mailing you with this stuff, you just know a game is going to be big ... and hey .. it really is. Yesterday I loaded up the game for the first time, a lovely but wahaaaaay too long intro sequence starts and immediately you'll be flabbergasted by the image quality thrown in your face. A near goose bumps experience for sure. But hey, I'm a graphics whore ...

Of course we just HAVE to look at graphics performance for this title as there is one certainty, Far Cry 2 will end up in our benchmark suite. There's just no doubt about it, the game is gonna be a success. Next to that, the game has a benchmark tool, which you guys can use just as well. Very cool.

So while you think benchmarking games is fun .. I really was like "frack .. here we go again". I picked up roughly 17 graphics cards and took that agonizing strawl onwards to our test systems.

What we'll do today is what you can expect from a site like Guru3D.com, we take all modern GeForce and Radeon graphics cards, seek a nice image quality setting and report back to you what you can expect performance and quality wise from this bitching title. Seventeen cards versus 4 resolutions versus 3 runs per resolution. That's 204 benchmark sessions.

Next page please where the fun begins ...