ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB Graphics Card and AMD Eyefinity Review

Far Cry 2

Far Cry 2 is the spiritual sequel to one of the best selling and longest living games on the PC though this title was developed not by Crytek, but by Ubisoft directly using a completely new engine as well.  The game is set in Africa and you have malaria – what else do you need to know?



Far Cry 2 includes a great benchmarking utility that allows us to setup for in-game testing of all varieties and includes both the ability to benchmark based on time (variable frame count) or based on speed (fixed frame count) – we went with the time-based option to simulate real-world gaming and allowing for apples-to-apples comparisons. 



Now this was the performance we were looking for out of this new generation of parts from AMD – the HD 5870 not only topples the GTX 285 but is competitive with the dual-GPU GTX 295!  At 2560×1600 the HD 5870 is within about 15% of the average frame framerate of the GTX 295 and matches its minimum FPS.  At 1680×1050 the GTX 295 is only 3% faster or so.  The GTX 285 averages a loss by about 20% or so across the different configurations.




Again with CrossFire the scaling in Far Cry 2 is impressive: at 2560×1600 we see a 72% boost in average frame rate and 2x gain in the minimum frame rate. 

Our experience with Far Cry 2 were not as great as other titles using AMD Eyefinity technology even though it was on AMD’s “working” list we received before testing.