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.

Included within the PC version of Far Cry 2 is an advanced benchmark tool, which offers an excellent array of settings for performance testing. For CPU-dependant testing, Far Cry 2 was configured to run at the ultra-low resolution of 640x480 with settings turned to their lowest possible options. With no strain on the GPU, frame rates were bound by CPU performance.

Oddly enough, it was the older Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD4P motherboard that has been designated as our reference point for benchmarks that performed the best when FarCry-2 was made to be CPU-bound. The other motherboards trailed behind the 102 FPS lead with 98.8 FPS each.

Benchmark Reviews used the maximum settings allowed for Far Cry 2 DirectX-10 tests, with the resolution set to 1920x1200. Render Quality and Performance settings were all set to 'Ultra High', and HDR and Bloom were enabled. At this resolution, the X58 systems all became GPU-bound.

The Gigabyte EX58-UD4P motherboard leads with 60.8 FPS, with the Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7 producing 59.8 FPS on average followed by the ASUS P6X58D-Premium which rendered 59.5 FPS. After comparing the results, it appears that the original Gigabyte X58-Express motherboard may have a very slight edge over the newer versions with shared PCI-Express 2.0 link lanes, but not enough to notice with most video games.

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