Diamond HD4890-XOC, Review – Part 2

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 with AI enabled:

Now at 1680×1050 with AI enabled.

All of our video cards can play Far Cry 2 very satisfactorily.  The GTX280 leads the single-GPU cards but the overclocked HD4890-XOC narrows the performance gap somewhat and clearly beats the HD4870.  Our HD4870-X2 also puts in an impressive performance as ATi evidently solved their driver issues that plagued this game for a few months after it was released.