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 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.

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 8xAA (anti-aliasing) and 16xAF (anisotropic filtering).

The cards used throughout this test:

• Radeon HD 4870 1024 MB
• GeForce GTX 280 1024MB (reference clocks)
• GeForce GTX 285 1024MB (reference clocks)

As you can see, the GTX 285 has gotten a slight performance boost thanks to the higher core/shader and memory frequencies.

But that's not all. With the reference, baseline, numbers in mind. Now let's see how well the different AIBs do performance wise compared to reference performance :)

Now again we have the same settings, DX10 mode with 8x AA applied yet compare the GTX 285 boards we received towards the reference clocked GTX 285.

• GeForce GTX 285 1024MB (reference clocks)
• GeForce GTX 285 1024MB (Inno3D Overclock)
• GeForce GTX 285 1024MB (Point of View EXO)
• GeForce GTX 285 1024MB (eVGA SSC)

Scaling throughout the review will be the same. Close to reference is inno3D as their shader domain is not overclocked. And then the top dogs are the GTX 285's from Point of View and leading (in all tests) eVGA's SSC.

I have one more chart I want to show you as we'll also study the effect of Multi-GPU gaming.

Abobe the results in chronological order:

• GeForce GTX 285 1024MB (reference clocks / Single card)
• GeForce GTX 280 1024MB SLI (BFG OC edition / Two cards)
• GeForce GTX 285 1024MB SLI (reference clocks / Two cards)
• GeForce GTX 285 1024MB 3-way SLI (reference clocks / Three cards)

Pretty interesting, 3-way SLi takes off at 1600x1200 already, again DX10 mode with 8xAA here.