Geforce 180.42 Beta
Far Cry 2 hasn't been released yet, but nevertheless Nvidia released a Beta driver that is supposed to deliver performance boost for the Geforce cards. So the "green ones” do the same as AMD and release a optimized Far Cry 2 driver.

Results
The 180.42 increases the performance of the GTX 260 about 5 percent in DX9 mode and in DX10 mode even 27 to 30 percent - but with Anti-Aliasing only. In DX10 mode the Geforce GTX 280, which is benched for the first time, reaches 84 percent of the performance of a Radeon HD 4870 X2 - without micro stuttering.

The DX10 mode with Ultra High settings runs faster than the DX9 mode with Ultra High settings. So Far Cry 2 is the first game that isn't just looking better on DX10 but also delivers a better performance. We can only speculate about the reasons for this, but it seems like Nvidia integrated some optimizations for the DirectX 10.1 features that are supported on DX10 boards - please take a look at the excerpt of our interview with the Far Cry 2 developers. We are currently investigating if the increased performance is reached by reducing the visual quality.

Currently we can only recommend the Geforce 180.42 Beta if you plan to play Far Cry 2 as soon as it has been released. You can download the driver from Nvidia's homepage. The benchmark results can be found on the next page.