VGA performance: Far Cry 2

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.

Limitations

Before we dive into performance results, I will share a few limitations that were set for this article. First off, this is an early engineering sample, not the final product. As such, power management was not 100% working, therefore we were asked to leave out numbers on power consumption, noise and heat levels. Funnily enough, they are all pretty okay already.

Second limitation: there is a set number of titles we can use in this review. NVIDIA requested that we opted and used modern Top 10 games for this preview.

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.

Same image quality settings, yet now we are in High-quality DX10 mode with 4xAA (anti-aliasing) and 16xAF (anisotropic filtering).

Initially the Radeon 4870 X2 had a lot of issues with this title, 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 were released, they added another 5 to 10% performance to the game.

In DirectX 10 with 4xAA this brings the two cards extremely close to each other. Very nice overall performance by the way, very nice indeed. It's a minor win for the GTX 295 here, mind you that for the GTX 295 we are using an early beta driver (180.88).

It will get a little more interesting when we apply 8xAA though, check it out:

Now again we have the same settings, DX 10 mode but with 8xAA applied. Now, it seems that at 2560x1600 we precisely hit a framebuffer threshold for the GTX 295. The 4870 X2 has slightly more memory available, which might give it the advantage. However, observe 1280x1024 up to 1920x1200. That's a pretty significant difference in-between the two cards.

The performance hit that the X2 takes is working out just much better for NVIDIA.