GeForce GTX 580 3-way SLI review - VGA performance: Far Cry 2 (DX10)

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 mines 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.

I like Far Cry 2 very much. Not so much for the gameplay anymore, yet the rendered environment and how the game can react to it. We are in:

• Level: Ranch Small
• High-quality DX10 mode
• 8x AA (Anti-Aliasing)
• 16x AF (Anisotropic Filtering)

Only at 2560x1600 do we see nice, well, reasonable enough performance scaling, and here again we have 8xAA enabled. And all settings at very HIGH. This surprized us a bit really, but it is again that 3.8 Ghz clocked Core i7 holding the three GPUs back. 

Again, the very same settings, DX10, very high image quality and eight AA samples. NVIDIA opened up a can of driver performance in Far Cry 2, leading performance but CPU bottlenecked at 1920x1200. Let's check out an extremely GPU bound title.