Before playing games, setting up your monitor's contrast & brightness levels is a very important thing to do. I realized recently that a lot of you guys have set up your monitors improperly. How do we know this? Because we receive a couple of emails every now and then telling us that a reader can't distinguish between the benchmark charts (colors) in our reviews. We realized, if that happens, your monitor is not properly setup.

This simple test pattern is evenly spaced from 0 to 255 brightness levels, with no profile embedded. If your monitor is correctly set up, you should be able to distinguish each step, and each step should be roughly visually distinct from its neighbors by the same amount. Also, the dark-end step differences should be about the same as the light-end step differences. Finally, the first step should be completely black.

Far Cry 2

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 were about to get seriously messed up for you? Well, tough luck. You are no longer at that deserted tropical island but 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 an imaginary African nation.

Everything that goes down is involved in a dirty little bush war in central Africa and you'll have 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.

Alright, we are kicking off with Far Cry 2 - Image quality settings: High-quality DX10 mode with 4xAA (anti-aliasing) and 16xAF (anisotropic filtering).

We take three cards in this review:

1. GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 (direct competitor to the 1GB Radeon HD 4870)
2. Radeon HD 4870 512MB (to spot the difference based on memory)
3. Radeon HD 4870 1024Mb HIS IceQ4+ turbo

Initially the Catalyst 8.10 driver ATI had a significant disadvantage in their drivers. Catalyst 8.11 however fixed a number of things and their claim of a 3 to 10% increase in performance seems valid. A week or two ago when Catalyst 8.12 drivers released, it added another 5 to 10% performance to the game.

The combo of the 1024MB memory, Catalyst 8.12 driver and standard HIS overclock reaps extra benefits in performance here. Look at the 512MB 4870 plunge after 1920x1200. A classic example of a framebuffer limitation.

In retrospect, would we have used an OC edition GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 here, it would have been a tie. Everything is relative.