'Far Cry 2' playable on modest gaming PCs

Based on a report from PC Games Hardware (via VoodooExtreme), it seems forthcoming shooter Far Cry 2 may let even the midrange masses dial up its image quality. According the PCGH, "Even with a Core 2 Duo E6600 or an Athlon 64 X2 6000+ and a Geforce 9800 GT/8800 GT or a Radeon HD 4850 you can play the highest settings." You can find such a system from Dell, Gateway, and others for under $1,200.

We're also excited that it apparently scales very well according to the number of CPU cores you have. Few games really tax the CPU power of even quad core PCs. With Intel's new Core i7 chips hitting eight cores (and assuming Far Cry 2 will scale across all of them), we're glad to hear game developers are finally starting to take full advantage of all of that computing power.

Now we just hope a) the game is fun, and that you might actually care how fast it runs, and b) the DRM doesn't thwart our own benchmarking efforts, which require us to install a game on every gaming system we test. The game seems to have a robust built-in benchmarking tool (increasingly rare lately), which we'd love to put to work.