GTX 480 vs. HD 5870, 8x AA Performance Analysis, Part 3

Just Cause 2

Just Cause 2 is a 2010 sandbox-style action video game by Swedish developer Avalanche Studios and Eidos Interactive and is the sequel to the 2006 video game, Just Cause.  Just Cause 2 employs the Avalanche Engine 2.0 which an updated version of the engine used in the original and there are impressive visuals as it is made just for DX10.  It is set on the fictional tropical island of Panau in Southeast Asia. Rico Rodriguez returns as the protagonist who aims to overthrow the evil dictator “Baby” Panay and also to confront his former boss, rogue agent Tom Sheldon.  The game play is similar to that of its predecessor in that the player is free to roam the huge open world without a need to focus on the storyline.

The Just Cause 2 AI has been rewritten to use a planning system which enables the in-game enemies to do more and there is also more vertical game play as well as a manual aiming system that allows the player to target enemy NPC’s specific limbs.  Just Cause 2 also includes an adaptive difficulty system which scales as the player progresses.  There are also new weapons in Just Cause 2 which include launching laser-controlled rockets as well as several new vehicles including a Boeing 737.  Just Cause 2 now includes dual-grappling hooks which give players the ability to tether unlimited objects to each other including the tethering of enemies to vehicles and to each other which works very well as one of your goals is to cause maximum chaos.

We cannot compare Just Cause 2 performance with AA enabled on our GTX 480 directly against the HD 5870 as they use different kinds of AA in the official benchmark in the full retail game that we used. We always use the settings available to us in the game or demo benchmark tool with the exception of Unreal Tournament 3 and Crysis.

Here are the settings available to us on the Radeon; clearly 8xCSAA is impossible.  We also suspect the Radeon results may not be correct but we present our results anyway:

Notice that the HD 5870 (above) is supposedly running at 8xCSAA in the benchmark while it runs at 8xAA on the GTX 480 (below).  There are also extra settings that are available to the GTX 480 that are not available to the Radeon users.  We cannot compare the two card’s performance exactly to each other at 8xAA nor are we certain the HD 5870 is running it correctly.  We will investigate further in a later article.

First the benches with the GTX 480:

Now let’s look at the performance with the HD 5870 with slightly less stressful settings than for the GTX 480:

We can see the performance hit of 8xAA on the GTX 480 and the performance hit of on the HD 5870.  The respective percentage hits are detailed in the performance summary just before our conclusion.