Big GPU Shootout – Revisited

FarCry 2

Far Cry 2 uses the name of the original Far Cry but it is not connected to the first game as it brings you a new setting and a new story. Ubisoft created it based on their Dunia Engine. The game setting takes place in an unnamed African country, during an uprising between two rival warring factions. Your mission is to kill “The Jackal”; the Nietzsche-quoting mercenary that arms both sides of the conflict that you are dropped into.

The Far Cry 2 game world is loaded in the background and on the fly to create a completely seamless open world. The Dunia game engine provides good visuals that scale well. The Far Cry 2 design team actually went to Africa to give added realism to this game. One thing to especially note is Far Cry 2’s very realistic fire propagation by their engine that is a far cry from the scripted fire and explosions that we are used to seeing.

Far Cry 2 benchmark at 1920×1200 – all resolutions tested with AI enabled:

Now at 1680×1050:

Now at 1440×900:

All of our video cards can play Far Cry 2 very satisfactorily at the resolutions chosen for them except for our HD 2900 XT. The midrange GPUs all do nicely at even 1680×1050 which appears to be their playable resolution limit. The 8800 GTX leads when the GTS 250’s minimums takes a nosedive and is even beaten by the 9800 GT; perhaps because the GTS only has 512 MB of video RAM.

Unfortunately, here we saw the biggest performance loss with Catalyst 9-5 from the earlier one with our HD 4870 and HD 4870-X2. Conversely, the HD 4980 had a nice performance gain from the new drivers.  A note about Nvidia’s GeForce 185.85 drivers that we are testing in this review – generally there were nice performance gains with it overall, compared with the last 182.08 set.

The GTX 280 leads the single-GPU card and our HD 4890 clearly beats the HD 4870. Our HD 4870-X2 still puts in a good performance, and TriFire scales nicely.