Throw your memory back to the year 2004 and the release of the innovative Far Cry on PC. Developer Crytek managed to fashion one of the most convincing and striking locales in all of gaming, and satisfied gamers with the freedom to pass through the landscape and tackle enemies in almost any way they saw fit. You surely remember Jack Carver and that things where about to get seriously messed up for you ? Well, tough luck. You are no longer at that deserted tropical island yet hop into a jeep and arrive at the sandy savannah surroundings of Africa. And that's a change .. as much as you'll no longer run into any mutants, aliens, or any superpowers or psychic powers. Also -- you are no longer Jack Carver, you assume the role of one of nine different mercenaries who are embedded in the midst of a brutal civil war which rages in a imaginary African nation.

Everything that goes down is involved in a dirty little bush war in central Africa and having to use a rusty AK-47 and whatever bits of scavenged land mine you can duct-tape together. Two factions struggle for supremacy: the United Front for Liberation and Labour and the Alliance for Popular Resistance, and both are known for blood and control.

It's da bombaaaah. You'll like the huge playing area which allows you to snipe a guard from a distance, leaving him injured in the hope that it draws his friends out, or you can barrel a car right through the walls, ploughing into the breakable scenery like a rubbish F1 driver. It's that immersive feel that gives the game that little extra. A full day-night cycle, storms and the sort of sunsets you'd have to spend your life savings to see for real. Aaah, just check it out.

So we took the following graphics cards to include in this VGA performance test:

VGA Cards used

GeForce 8800 GT 512MB

GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB

GeForce 8800 GTX 768 MB

GeForce 8800 GTX 768 MB

GeForce 8800 Ultra 768MB

GeForce 9600 GT 512MB

GeForce 9800 GTX+ 512MB

GeForce 9800 GX2 1024MB

GeForce GTX 260 896MB

GeForce GTX 280 1024MB

Radeon 3850 256MB

Radeon 3870 512MB

Radeon 4670 512MB

Radeon 4830 512MB

Radeon 4850 512MB

Radeon 4870 512MB

Radeon 4870 X2 2048MB

Here's what we did ...

We'll use the ATI Far Cry 2 Hotfix driver and for NVIDIA their yesterday's released 180.42 driver. NVIDIA's benchmark results where extremely consistent. ATI's driver however looks like it needs some more work. Nothing in the image quality department but there was quite a lot of performance fluctuation in the tests. At one run we'd get an average 40 FPS, in another run it was 43 FPS. So bare with me on that one, I do not consider the ATI results finalized. To equalize and retrieve a more consistent framerate we ran each time demo 3x and and then averaged out the results.

We selected an image quality setting that is pretty far fetched, applied to all cards in a similar fashion. Since the graphics engine can deal with a lot, we opt the best image quality available in-game, DirectX 10 mode and then enable 4 samples of anti-aliasing in very high image quality settings mode. A pretty tough configuration for sure.

The results is excellent image quality, yet it remains quite playable through out the scope of tested cards and resolutions. You can mimic our settings and benchmark yourself with the included benchmark tool.

We bypass GPU Physx to the CPU on both brands by the way.

Our Far Cry Image quality choice in settings