Far Cry 2 Benchmark Results

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 slightly lower settings for this test, with the resolution set to 1280x1024 and 1680x1050. The performance settings were all set to 'Medium', Render Quality was set to 'Optimum' (which was the same as "High" in this case), 4x anti-aliasing was applied, and HDR and Bloom were enabled. Of course DX10 was used exclusively for this series of tests.

Although the Dunia engine in Far Cry 2 is slightly less demanding than CryEngine 2 engine in Crysis, the strain appears to be similar. Far Cry 2 also seems to have been optimized for, or at least written with a clear understanding of, DX10 requirements.

Using the short 'Ranch Small' time demo (which yields the lowest FPS of the three tests available), only the modern video cards are capable of producing playable frame rates with moderate settings applied. The Radeon HD5670 is one of those that gets its chin above the bar in this game. Although the Dunia engine seems to be optimized for NVIDIA chips, the improvements ATI incorporated in their latest GPUs are just enough to allow this game to be played with a mid-range card, albeit one at the upper end of the range. Older ATI products struggle with this benchmark, and if you've got one of those, the HD5xxx cards would be a good upgrade for playing this game.

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

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