VGA performance: Far Cry 2 (DX10)
Setup your monitor
Before playing games, setting up your monitor's contrast & brightness levels is a very important thing to do. I realized recently that a lot of you guys have set up your monitor improperly. How do we know this? Because we receive a couple of emails every now and then telling us that a reader can't distinguish between the benchmark charts (colors) in our reviews. We realized, if that happens, your monitor is not properly set up.
This simple test pattern is evenly spaced from 0 to 255 brightness levels, with no profile embedded. If your monitor is correctly set up, you should be able to distinguish each step, and each step should be visually distinct from its neighbors by the same amount. Also, the dark-end step differences should be about the same as the light-end step differences. Finally, the first step should be completely black.
Far Cry 2
Throw your memory back to the year 2004 and the release of the innovative Far Cry on PC. Developer Crytek managed to fashion one of the most convincing and striking locales in all of gaming, and satisfied gamers with the freedom to pass through the landscape and tackle enemies in almost any way they saw fit. You surely remember Jack Carver and that things were about to get seriously messed up for you? Well, tough luck. You are no longer at that deserted tropical island but hop into a jeep and arrive at the sandy savannah surroundings of Africa. And that's a change... as much as you'll no longer run into any mutants, aliens, or any superpowers or psychic powers. Also - you are no longer Jack Carver, you assume the role of one of nine different mercenaries who are embedded in the midst of a brutal civil war which rages in an imaginary African nation.
Everything that goes down is involved in a dirty little bush war in central Africa and you'll have to use a rusty AK-47 and whatever bits of scavenged land mine you can duct-tape together. Two factions struggle for supremacy: the United Front for Liberation and Labour and the Alliance for Popular Resistance, and both are known for blood and control.
We start off with a title I like very much. Not so much for the gameplay, yet the rendered environment and how the game can react to it. We are in high-quality DX10 mode with 8xAA (anti-aliasing) and 16xAF (anisotropic filtering).
The cards used throughout this test:
- Radeon HD 4870 1024 MB
- GeForce GTX 280 1024MB (reference clocks)
- GeForce GTX 285 1024MB eVGA (SSC edition)
- GeForce GTX 285 1024MB BFG (OCX edition)
- GeForce GTX 295 1792MB BFG
So here we have a nice spectrum of competing cards. Mind you that the Radeon HD 4870 (magnificent card really) sells for as little as 279-299 USD these days. The OC editions of the GTX 285 cost more than 399 USD. What I also figured was interesting to do is insert the (Dual GPU) GTX 295. That card sells at 499,- and as this review will show... constantly is much faster.
In the Single GPU segment the fastest card to date is the BFG OCX edition though. The difference with the eVGA SSC edition is NIL really. BFG's memory is clock a petite bit faster, resulting in an extra frame here and there.
