VGA performance: Far Cry 2 (DX10)
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 today with Far Cry 2. We have set up the game in high-quality DX10 mode with 8x AA (anti-aliasing) and 16x AF (anisotropic filtering). To keep it tidy and clean, we'll make one chart for the NVIDIA cards and another one for ATI's finest.
Since we use a lot of blue in the charts and if you have not set up your monitor that well, here's a pointer - the darker blue is always Windows 7 mhhkay?
Above you can see (lower two lines) the GeForce GTX 285 in Vista (64-bit) and Windows 7 (64-bit). Then the upper two lines are a GeForce GTX 295 again in both Windows 7 and Vista.
All tests have been performed on the same hardware (same PC actually) with the same 190.38 WHQL driver. Far Cry 2 was one of the very few titles where, for multi-GPU setups, Vista was a teenie weenie bit faster.
Next chart, ATI. Once we look at the lower two lines we see the Radeon HD 4890 performing dead on par with itself in both Vista and Windows 7. Here we also see that with the (upper two lines) multi-GPU based 4870 X2 Windows Vista seems to be a tiny bit faster. It really is very little though.
For Both ATI and NVIDIA cards we have had no stability issues in Windows 7.
