VGA performance: Far Cry 2 (DX10)

Setup your monitor first

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.

Far Cry 2 I like very much. Not so much for the gameplay anymore, yet the rendered environment and how the game can react to it. We are in high-quality DX10 mode with 8x AA (anti-aliasing) and 16xAF (anisotropic filtering).

For today's test session we are going to keep thing clear and simple. We'll directly compare the old model GTX 295 and the new single PCB version GTX 295 from Point of View. With exactly the same clock frequency, you probably can understand that the results will be very similar, with the random offset occurrences here and there.

We re-benchmarked the older GTX 295 as well with the all new GeForce 185.85 WHQL driver. The 185 series driver offers a very nice performance increase in a lot of gaming titles. It is recommended to download them and try out.

In red the new single PCB GTX 295, in green the 'old' model and in blue for reference comparison and scaling we included a GeForce GTX 275. It never ceases to amaze me how much performance the GTX 295 can offer once the two GPUs start crunching and rendering the game.

Lately what we always do as well is to include a chart with nothing other than the card tested versus monitor resolutions. That way, in an easy to grasp manner you can understand how well/bad it is performing at key resolutions. As you can see, the GTX 295 caves in at 2560x1600. We do have 8x AA enabled here, going back to 4x AA would make it very playable.