VGA performance: Far Cry 2 (DX10)

Setup your monitor

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 monitor 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 set up.

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.

Okay, let's rock and roll... we start off with a title I like very much. Not so much for the gameplay, yet the rendered environment and how the game can react to it. We are in high-quality DX10 mode with 8x AA (anti-aliasing) and 16x AF (anisotropic filtering).

The cards used throughout this test:

• Radeon HD 4870 X2 2048MB (reference)
• GeForce 9800 GTX+ (reference)
• GeForce GTX 285 1024MB (reference)
• GeForce GTX 295 (BFG H2O)

Now since the GTX is 100% clocked similar to other GTX 295 cards we tested earlier, we did not include any other GTX 295 card as the results would be identical. Closest to the GTX 295 competition wise is obviously the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which is included. We also include the fastest single-GPU based solution, the GTX 285, and to show you performance scaling and the level of raw power we are playing with, the very value rich GeForce 9800 GTX+.

The results above, a very competitive chart, with the BFG H2O in leading position. At 2560x1600 it however drops in performance, as it has less video memory available (per GPU) than the X2 and GTX 285.

This is a little new thing I am trying out. Sometimes you guys stare yourselves completely and utterly blind at comparative performance. From here onwards we are including a chart with just the test card alone, so you can perceive a better grasp as to where the performance really is, and how it scales in monitor resolution ranging from budget monitors to the most high-end, ending at 2560x1600.

As you can see, at 2560x1600 we precisely hit a framebuffer threshold for the GTX 295, but at 8x Anti-aliasing... that's pretty frickin' astonishing performance really. 4xAA would get much higher framerates at that resolution btw.