Far Cry 2 Benchmark Results

Ubisoft 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. HDR and Bloom are automatically enabled in DX10 mode.

Even on a game that typically favors the Green Machine, the performance of the latest NVIDIA GPU in this test is nothing short of amazing. It's not worth even running the numbers, the advantage for the GF104 chip is so overwhelming. Using the short 'Ranch Small' time demo (which yields the lowest FPS of the three tests available), many of the midrange products we've tested are capable of producing playable frame rates with the settings all turned up. Now it seems we have a midrange video card that absolutely dominates this game. If you like this game, the GTX460 is for you.

The higher resolution testing doesn't change the rankings at all, and the EVGA GTX460 SC still produces stellar results at 1920 x 1200. With these kinds of average frame rates, there is less chance of any stutter making it into game play. I was curious to see how well the GTX460 did on minimum frame rates, given the outstanding performance on average, so here is what I learned:

The minimum frame rate never dropped below 50 FPS, and there are only two sharp dips in the chart, one at the very beginning and again at the 13 second mark. It was probably one of the many explosions, the first one takes place at close range, and has a lot of detail associated with it. I've been glancing at these charts every time I run this benchmark, even though we generally don't report the results, and this is definitely one of the smoother and flatter curves I've seen.

Our next benchmark of the series puts our collection of video cards against some fresh graphics in the recently released Resident Evil 5 benchmark.

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