GTX 480 vs. HD 5870, 8x AA Performance Analysis, Part 3
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.
First let’s check out 2560×1600:
Here the GTX 480 takes an even more commanding lead over the HD 5870 when they are both tested at 8xAA. Clearly the GTX 480 runs away from the HD 5870 at our highest resolutions. Now we test Far Cry 2 benchmark at 1920×1200 – all of the resolutions that we test are with AI enabled.
We note that nowhere does the Radeon come close to the GTX 480’s performance in this game. Finally we test at 1680×1050 resolution:
Here we see a clean sweep by GTX 480 in Far Cry 2 – and when both run at 8xAA, the performance difference is magnified.
Please take into consideration that nVidia uses a different version of AntiAliasing starting 8x and up, therefore comparisons are henceforth limited at best. Sadly I don’t have a direct link right now, but please take it into consideration before drawing (final) conclusions.
We took special care to make sure that identical AA settings were applied in all of our benchmarks including for Crysis. We even noted that in the full retail game, Just Cause 2, that we observed the benchmark results showed the Radeon was running at 8xCSAA while the GeForce was 8xAA.
However, we have since learned from AMD that the benchmark results are wrongly identifying 8xMSAA as CSAA. The Radeon is actually running 8xMSAA and this minor issue will be addressed in a future patch.
Everything we test is “apples to apple” unless it is specified in the review.
Nice article man. Cheers
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