Date:
Monday , October 27, 2008
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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FarCry 2 Gameplay Performance

We play FarCry 2 and find the best gaming experience served up by seven video cards from AMD and NVIDIA. A2A testing is done as well with all seven video cards. We spell out what GPU you need to get the FarCry 2 gaming you want. New drivers are used too!

Introduction

If you haven’t already, take a peek at our Early Performance Preview of FarCry 2. In that preview we discussed some aspects of gameplay performance derived from a brief stint playing the new game FarCry 2. This article greatly expands upon that preview by giving you the highest playable settings on each of seven current generation video cards using our standard gameplay evaluation method after having played through the entire game. We also include apples-to-apples testing using real world gameplay as well. We are including seven video cards from AMD and NVIDIA. You will find the GeForce GTX 280, GeForce GTX 260 (216 core), GeForce GTX 260 (original) and Radeon HD 4870 X2, Radeon HD 4870 (1GB and 512MB) and Radeon HD 4850 represented here.

FarCry 2 has been a much anticipated game. However, it is important to realize that this is not a sequel to FarCry; this is an entirely new game with a new storyline developed by Ubisoft Montreal and not Crytek like FarCry was. In fact, this game does not use the CryEngine 2 (as used in Crysis) as most people would have assumed either. FarCry 2 uses a proprietary game engine called Dunia made specifically for this game.

This game engine fully supports DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 with some advanced physical effects such as a live propagating fire and weather system in the game. Wind will actually be able to start fires and have it spread creating havoc for the players. In a follow-up to this performance evaluation, to be published next week, we will deep dive into DX9 versus DX10 performance and image quality differences.

Drivers

Similar to our Preview, both NVIDIA and AMD again have new drivers to push FarCry 2 to new performance heights with their video cards. For the NVIDIA GPU based video cards here we are using the newly released (as of October 24th) ForceWare 180.43 Beta. These new drivers contain performance improvements specifically for FarCry 2.

For AMD GPU based video cards we are using a newly released to press driver, that contains performance improvements for FarCry 2 and a bug fix. This hotfix driver is newer than the one previously posted on their website that we used in last week’s Preview. These new hotfix drivers have the version number of 8.551.1 and we expect these to be released to the public within 48 hours of publishing this article if not sooner. These new hotfix drivers contain a fix to a “rock bug” discussed here.

Updated: New HotFix from AMD that fixes image quality discussed above. This is the HotFix we used for testing in this evaluation. You can now get it here.