Sapphire Radeon HD 5770 FleX 1GB

Just Cause 2 might not belong to a well-established series of games, but with its launch, it looks like that might not be the case for long. The game offers not only superb graphics, but an enormous world to explore, and for people like me, a countless number of hidden items to find around it. During the game, you’ll be scaling skyscrapers, racing through jungles and fighting atop snow-drenched mountains. What’s not to like?

Manual Run-through: The level chosen here is part of the second mission in the game, “Casino Bust”. Our runthrough begins at the second-half of the level, which requires us to situate ourselves on top of a car and have our driver, Karl Blaine, speed us through part of the island to safety. This is a great mission for benchmarking as we get to see a lot of the landmass, even if some of it is at a distance.

Just Cause 2 is a gorgeous game, and that’s reflected in the performance. Using our maxed out detail settings, along with 4xAA, isn’t reasonable for many GPUs even at 1080p, so let’s take a look at the best playable:

For the most part, the detail settings can remain high on the HD 5770 and still deliver good framerates, but the 2560×1600 resolution is an unrealistic prospect. The same can be said about ambient occlusion and of course, anti-aliasing.

Just Cause 2 @ 4800×900: High Texture, Medium Shadows/Water/Objects, SSAO/High-Res Off, 0xAA	Min: 30 / Avg: 39.424 FPS

Being that there are many more pixels to push compared to 1920×1080, we had to lower some of the detail levels a bit, with very high textures being pushed down to high, and AO being disabled entirely. Despite these additional decreases, the game still looks great – and this is one of those titles that really can become immersive with 3×1 setups.