NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250 Mainstream GPU

Name: NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250 Mainstream GPU - Page 6
Brand: NVIDIA

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, March 03, 2009, 03:00 AM EDT

FarCry 2

DirectX Gaming Performance

FarCry 2

Like the original, FarCry 2 is one of the more visually impressive games to be released on the PC to date. Courtesy of the Dunia game engine developed by Ubisoft, FarCry 2's game-play is enhanced by advanced environment physics, destructible terrain, high resolution textures, complex shaders, realistic dynamic lighting, and motion-captured animations. We benchmarked the graphics cards in this article with a fully patched version of FarCry 2, using one of the built-in demo runs recorded in the "Ranch" map. The test results shown here were run at various resolutions with 4X AA and No anisotropic enabled concurrently.

FarCry 2 clearly shows the benefit of the GTS 250's 1GB frame buffer, versus the 512MB frame buffers of the Radeon HD 4850 and 9800 GTX+. At the lower resolution, all of the mainstream cards perform somewhat similarly, with the GTS 250 finishing out in front of the similarly priced cards (the 4870 and GTX 260 were another story). With the resolution cranked up to 2560x1600, however, the 1GB GTS 250 significantly outperforms the 512MB 9800 GTX+ or Radeon HD 4850.

Tags: Nvidia, GeForce, graphics, GPU, video

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com