Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 Vapor-X 2GB

Sequels are common, and three of our six games used here prove it. But what’s different with Far Cry 2, though, is that while the other sequels here don’t throw you for a loop when you first load it up and generally give you what you’d expect to see, this game does the absolute opposite. We knew for months that Far Cry 2 wasn’t going to be a direct continuation of the original, but for the most part, this game could have gone by any other name and no one would even make a connection. Luckily for Ubisoft, though, the game can still be great fun.

Like the original, this game is a first-person shooter that offers open-ended gameplay, similar to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. You’ll be able to roam the huge map (50km^2) of a central African state which will mostly be traversed by vehicle, as walking even 2% in any direction gets very tedious after a while. This game is a perfect GPU benchmark simply because the graphics are better than the average, with huge draw distances, realistic nature and even a slew of animals to pass by (and kill if you are evil enough).

Our run through takes place in the Shwasana region, and consists of leaving a small hut and walking towards four people prepared to kill me for no apparent reason (except that this is a game). After the opponents are eliminated, a walk along the dirt road continues for another twenty seconds until we reach a small hut with supplies.

Once again, we can see the 2GB card pull ahead over the 1GB thanks in part to the latest drivers. All three resolutions were playable with max detail and 4xAA, but like the two previous titles, 30 FPS is a bare minimum, so we have cut it close one more time.

Although we bearly broke through the 30 FPS mark, we still experienced sufficient smoothness in our gameplay, so we stuck with it. Like the previous games, not everyone will agree on this, so some may drop things down to 4xAA. At anything below 2560×1600 though, 4xAA isn’t remotely a problem.