Sparkle GeForce GTX 275 Video Card Review

Far Cry 2

Far Cry 2 is a first-person shooter video game developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft. It was released on October 21, 2008 in North America. Crytek, the developers of the original game, were not involved in the development of Far Cry 2.

Ubisoft has developed a new engine specifically for Far Cry 2 called Dunia, meaning “world,” “earth” or “living” in Parsi but also used in many languages. The Dunia Engine was built specifically for Far Cry 2 by the Ubisoft Montreal development team. It delivers realistic destructible environments, special effects such as dynamic fire propagation and storm effects, real-time night-and-day cycle, dynamic music system and non-scripted enemy A.I. The 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. 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.

The fire effects and lighting of Far Cry 2 are fairly stylized, as opposed to the “realistic” lighting of STALKER: Clear Sky or even Call of Duty: World at War. First-person shooters tend to be favored as benchmark tests, but the games in LegitReviews’ testing library play more differently than their common FPS heritage suggests. I’m not willing to make any predictions as to how popular/enduring the Dunia engine turns out to be in the longer term, but Ubisoft Montreal has done impressive work here. FC2 performance was measured using FRAPS with multiple run-throughs at each resolution point to eliminate outliers.

Benchmark Results: Far Cry 2 is another NVIDIA-friendly title and Sparkle’s GeForce GTX 275 nails the price/performance ratio in this particular game. Ubisoft Montreal deserves kudos for keeping the jungle flowing smoothly at all detail levels; 1900×1200 with 4x AA is quite playable in FC2, even as Crysis Warhead dissolves into a stutterfest.