Far Cry 2 Benchmark

Ubisoft has developed Far Cry 2 as a sequel to the original, but with a very different approach to game play and story line. Far Cry 2 features a vast world built on Ubisoft's new game engine called Dunia, meaning "world", "earth" or "living" in Farci. The setting in Far Cry 2 takes place on a fictional Central African landscape, set to a modern day timeline.

The Dunia engine was built specifically for Far Cry 2, by Ubisoft Montreal development team. It delivers realistic semi-destructible environments, special effects such as dynamic fire propagation and storms, real-time night-and-day sun light and moon light cycles, dynamic music system, and non-scripted enemy A.I actions.

The Dunia game engine takes advantage of multi-core processors as well as multiple processors and supports DirectX 9 as well as DirectX 10. Only 2 or 3 percent of the original CryEngine code is re-used, according to Michiel Verheijdt, Senior Product Manager for Ubisoft Netherlands. Additionally, the engine is less hardware-demanding than CryEngine 2, the engine used in Crysis.

However, it should be noted that Crysis delivers greater character and object texture detail, as well as more destructible elements within the environment. For example; trees breaking into many smaller pieces and buildings breaking down to their component panels. Far Cry 2 also supports the amBX technology from Philips. With the proper hardware, this adds effects like vibrations, ambient colored lights, and fans that generate wind effects.

There is a benchmark tool in the PC version of Far Cry 2, which offers an excellent array of settings for performance testing. Benchmark Reviews used the maximum settings allowed for DirectX 10 tests, with the resolution set to 1920x1200. Performance settings were all set to 'Very High', Render Quality was set to 'Ultra High' overall quality, 8x anti-aliasing was applied, and HDR and Bloom were enabled.

Although the Dunia engine in Far Cry 2 is slightly less demanding than CryEngine 2 engine in Crysis, the strain appears to be extremely close. In Crysis we didn't dare to test AA above 4x, whereas we used 8x AA and 'Ultra High' settings in Far Cry 2. The end effect was a separation between what is capable of maximum settings, and what is not. Using the short 'Ranch Small' time demo (which yields the lowest FPS of the three tests available), we noticed that there are very few products capable of producing playable frame rates with the settings all turned up.

Inspecting the performance at 1920x1200 resolution, it appears that every graphics card we tested can handle higher quality settings and post-processing effects in Far Cry 2. ATI's Radeon HD 5770 produces 29.0 FPS, which is extremely close to the 31.4 FPS delivered by the Radeon HD 4890. Palit's GeForce GTX 260 Sonic performed at 36.4 FPS, followed by the ASUS GeForce GTX 285 TOP with 43.0 FPS. The Radeon HD 5850 leads the overclocked GTX 285 by only about one frame, and produced 43.9 FPS on average. The Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 5870 DirectX 11 video card 21161-00-50R topped the single-GPU Far Cry 2 performance chart with 51.3 FPS at 1920x1200, with a 19% lead over NVIDIA's direct competition.

Moving on to dual-GPU comparisons, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 displayed 56 FPS at 1920x1200 and edged out the HD5870's 51.3 FPS. This is fine if you're comparing those two cards (which sell at very different price points), but the ATI Radeon HD 5970 leaps over the GTX295 by almost 37% and produces a 76.6 frame rate under the same load. Perhaps that's The Way It's Meant To Be Played.

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