Far Cry 2

Throw your memory back to the year 2004 and the release of the innovative Far Cry on PC. Developer Crytek managed to fashion one of the most convincing and striking locales in all of gaming, and satisfied gamers with the freedom to pass through the landscape and tackle enemies in almost any way they saw fit. You surely remember Jack Carver and that things were about to get seriously messed up for you? Well, tough luck. You are no longer at that deserted tropical island but hop into a jeep and arrive at the sandy savannah surroundings of Africa. And that's a change... as much as you'll no longer run into any mutants, aliens, or any superpowers or psychic powers. Also - you are no longer Jack Carver, you assume the role of one of nine different mercenaries who are embedded in the midst of a brutal civil war which rages in an imaginary African nation.

Everything that goes down is involved in a dirty little bush war in central Africa and you'll have to use a rusty AK-47 and whatever bits of scavenged land mine you can duct-tape together. Two factions struggle for supremacy: the United Front for Liberation and Labour and the Alliance for Popular Resistance, and both are known for blood and control.

I like Far Cry 2 very much. Not so much for the gameplay anymore, yet the rendered environment and how the game can react to it.

Now typically we measure with very high-quality DX10 mode at 8x AA (anti-aliasing) and 16x AF (anisotropic filtering). Due to the nature of the 5450 we lowered IQ (texture quality etc) towards high, yet disabled antialiasing whatsoever. As you'll notice, even at 1024x768 that is not playable on the 5450. You'll need to drop image quality even further to low.

Resident Evil 5 (DirectX 10)

A new addition to our benchmark suite is Resident Evil 5. Capcom's newly released game ensures you a survival horror sequel that will let you bust up some zombies on your hard drive. Resident Evil 5 PC will support DirectX 9 and 10 along with ultra-high resolutions.

Resident Evil 5 looks fantastic and has a built in benchmark. We test at DirectX 10.0 mode with 4x AA -- all settings are maxed out including BLUR activated. Then we redo this test and disable all AA. As you can see 1024x768 slowly becomes a little bit playable .. but you'll need to disable even more image quality settings before the graphics card can cope with the workload.