EVGA GeForce GTS 250 Superclocked

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.

If I found out one thing while benchmarking the GTS 250, it’s that Far Cry 2 is brutal when it comes to lower-end cards. Like Crysis, our 1680×1050 setting was, for the most part, smooth, but anything higher would bring things to a crawl. Despite the FPS rating being higher than 30 at 1920×1200, it was simply unplayable, with not-so-rare lag spikes.

Not surprisingly, we were forced to drop AA in order to achieve better performance, and that we did. With it gone, we could run the game at 2560 just fine. There were some occasions where the game would stick for well under a second, but they were spread out and not all too annoying.