EVGA GeForce GTX 285 SSC Edition

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.

Not one to screw with tradition, the SSC card continued to perform slightly better than Zotac’s AMP! card, but a fair bit better than the reference. The card’s strengths can be exhibited even further by comparing it to the GTX 280 reference card in our chart… the differences are quite substantial.

Once again, EVGA’s card was “best playable” at our maximum tested settings of 4xAA and 2560×1600. Moving up to 8xAA proved too much for the card, and it’s no surprise given that to date, we’ve only been able to hit that reliably with two of GTX 285’s in SLI mode.