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.

Due to the nature of the price segment and relative performance we apply 2x AA here. Other than that we use High Quality settings throughout the game.

The cards used throughout this test (all reference design and specifications):

• Radeon HD 4750 512MB (RV740) | Internal Beta
• Radeon HD 4670 512MB | Catalyst 9.2 WHQL
• Radeon HD 4830 512MB | Catalyst 9.2 WHQL
• Radeon HD 4850 512MB | Catalyst 9.2 WHQL
• GeForce 9600 GT 512MB | GeForce 182.06 WHQL

Now what you'll notice is throughout the scope of tests we run is that the 4830 and RV740 are pretty darn close to each other in terms of performance. In the majority of games the RV740 is in fact slightly faster, nearly humping the 4850.

Also try to realize how close this sub 100 USD board is to the performance of a Radeon HD 4850. So up to 1920x1200 with HQ settings and 2xAA applied, you'll still game at an average of 37 frames per second, which is great.

Recently introduced in our tests. Sometimes you guys stare yourselves completely and utterly blind at comparative performance. From here on 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 more high-end resolutions.