Far Cry 3 Video Card Performance and IQ Review @ [H]

That's a bummer. I have my PC hooked to a HDTV, to 50Hz is no problem for me. Hopefully they fix the stuttering with a patch.

This only refinforces what I previously stated - [H] benchmarks without vsync in this game do not represent an actual gaming scenario - so they are irrelevant for people who play with vsync on (which I assume is a majority, because I can't imagine that most people like screen tearing).

Oh, I forgot to mention my amazing experience with Far Cry 3. I spent almost 20hrs in the game, nearly finished it, when uplay launcher borked. I uninstalled it, reinstalled and it noticed that my saves were gone. It turned out that saves are stored in the directory of the uplay launcher so when I uninstalled it, they were deleted with it. Of course I was not warned that this will happen. This way I lost all my progress.
 
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That's a bummer. I have my PC hooked to a HDTV, to 50Hz is no problem for me. Hopefully they fix the stuttering with a patch.

This only refinforces what I previously stated - [H] benchmarks without vsync in this game do not represent an actual gaming scenario - so they are irrelevant for people who play with vsync on (which I assume is a majority, because I can't imagine that most people like screen tearing).

Oh, I forgot to mention my amazing experience with Far Cry 3. I spent almost 20hrs in the game, nearly finished it, when uplay launcher borked. I uninstalled it, reinstalled and it noticed that my saves were gone. It turned out that saves are stored in the directory of the uplay launcher so when I uninstalled it, they were deleted with it. Of course I was not warned that this will happen. This way I lost all my progress.

game is smooth here with no tearing that I can see with vsync off (default setting) . the game set all on highest game settings with optimal .

this is on 3570k, 660ti I avg around 55-65 but i have no FSAA and run 1600x1200 res .
 
no, I am running with everything on highest except shadow is down one notch . running HDAO . basiclly just as in review ,except shdow and I am running no FSAA , I did have it on 2x but to me was not worth it as I was around 50fps , About 10 less fps or so .
 
After the latest Nvidia patch the game runs completely smooth maxed out on 1920x1200; sweet!
 
Originally Posted by Hooliegun
I found that SSAO tended to get a tad over-zealous on the shading effect. I kept seeing black halos around objects that shouldn't be shaded, and the effect was so distracting that I ended up turning off ambient occlusion altogether.

You have that backwards
When comparing the three slides of grass, and the three slides of the house in Brent's review - one can notice that SSAO and HBAO embedded a significant amount of shadowing - whereas HDBO did not, if at all. And if you compare the shots of the large wooden crate (the one that Brent pointed out) then I believe that the correctness of what is too much or too little shadowing becomes a more complex or a personal preference issue. Granted, if the light source was striking the subjects at other than a perpendicular angle, then real life would create a shadowing effect but it shouldn't have a distracting blackening halo effect. Too bad that Hooliegun didn't offer any examples of what he considered 'too much'.
 
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As a AMD user i can say AMD sucks in CF, as it can have horrific micro stutters, ware nVidia is smoother to play.

Only Tri and Quad CF works sorta descent, but there are not a lot of people that wane pay 3x or 4x $400 for there setup plus the extra 3~400 for there X79 mobo and CPU.
 
I'm looking at upgrading to a 4gb GTX 680 from either MSI, Asus, or EVGA next month in order to enjoy this game in all it's glory. How does performance differ on one of these cards versus a SLI setup with two 680s, if at all? I play primarily at 1080p, and have been considering moving to more than one screen if the price is right.
 
GTX 680 SLI here running at 2560*1600 with max settings (4MSAA, DX11, ULTRA).
Frankly, I a bit disappointed by the graphics which seem inferior to Crysis 1.
 
Specs in my sig: For me, basically using SSAO made gameplay smooth, vs. HDAO which was choppy. I also dropped Shadows down to "High" from "Ultra". This produces consistent 50 FPS or higher with a few dips. This is with 2x AA, Enhanced Alpha Coverage.

660 Ti here.
 
For 7970 crossfire users, this helped a lot to reduce stutter. From guru3d forums on the 12.11 betas.

"I added a line to the gamerprofile.xml located in \Documents\My Games\Far Cry 3. Type MaxFPS="60" Gfx_Maxfps="60" after ShowFPS ="0", save it and set the file to read only."

Also i forced vsync to on in ccc.

After that the game has been very playable and stutter is way less. its now far better for me in dx11, in dx9 there were massive slowdowns near water or long distance views, also no crosshair with any scoped weapon , also the water shimmered like crazy from a long distance , all those problems are all gone in dx11. Playing everying on Ultra, 2x AA , Enhanced Alpha, SSAO (prefer it to HDAO) .12.11 betas with cap2. Getting pretty much solid 60fps.
 
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580gtx sli rig here...Been tweaking this game for a few days. 2560x1600 is hard to tweak, as I really like nice visuals, but the high res murders my rig. I set visuals to custom/ultra and set shadows/post proc. one tick down to very high from ultra.

I have HBAO on and msaa off. I did not know about alpha needing msaa set to on, so I need to turn that off I guess. I can hover around 50-60 fps, moving around the map, but as soon as I engage in a fire fight, I hit 27-29fps all the time. Kinda sux. I would like to get to that sweet spot...I hope the nest nvdia driver set will help with that, or bring on Maxwell!...or the next Nvidia 7 series
 
"I have my PC hooked to a HDTV, to 50Hz is no problem for me" same here
 
I hate some of the post-processing effects used in games. For Nexuiz, as an example, I left all of that crap off. I'm not looking for "cinematic" graphics - I just want pleasant textures, specular, HDR, and the like. Image "enhancements" can really get on my nerves sometimes. Glad it saves some FPS.

Yeah, especially in arma 2 and dayz where it screws around with the lighting and everything.
 
Same here, I'm fed up with arma's configs with my hd 6770. Dunno what's the problem but sometimes the lightning screws all over.
 
i can play smoothly all maxed out at 1920x1080 with gigabyte 7950 windforce, ssd, and i7-2600k. didn't notice any visual issues throughout the whole game.
 
damn far cry 3 is an awesome game. I just purchased the deluxe bundle DLC for PC. Can't wait to play the Hurk mission.
 
[email protected] and [email protected] and 1920x1200 ... haven't noticed any performance problems. There are plenty of small graphical glitches though, and small locations where the lighting is applied incorrectly (like a 6" slice in a cave where bright outside lighting is used, or standing next to a window inside a house.) Also the large map has a thin 1 pixel gap in it at a certain zoom level at a certain location. What annoys me a lot is how long it takes to switch from game play to map to gameplay. Does the map need to fade in every time?! Or that saving has to blink for 3 seconds, and there is no fast save function key?
 
My performance in this game is horrific. I've tried several drivers, and the newest 310.90 seems to do the best, but I have to play on medium settings to get any kind of performance with a GTX 690 at 2560x1600. I also had to shut off DX11 mode so I would stop getting artifacts and texture loss. This is the only game I experience any problem with.

As a matter of fact, playing this game sounds a lot like the AMD results in this comparison, its completely unplayable at above console graphics settings, and refuses to utilize my GPU's past 50% or so.
 
guys this is sad i dont know if anyone of you have SLI or CROSS and game multiplayer but game freezes at the end of each round...and i discovered this so sad...

http://forums.ubi.com/showthread.php/737157-Far-Cry-3-Crashes-after-every-MP-game-PC?

Ubisoft replies are poor and i submitted tickets so other ppl with no reply or nonsense ones

cheers to all
Sergio

Yes i have given up on this game, It wont run right in Xfire or Tri Fire, and yes i reported on Day one that the game locks up after 1 round of multiplayer. I have tried to contact them and also posted on several Forums and never have gotten a reply. THIS GAME SUCKS AVOID!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 
The game runs fine on my system. I happen to really enjoy it. I've finished the story and I'm doing all of the small stuff now.
 
The game runs fine on my system. I happen to really enjoy it. I've finished the story and I'm doing all of the small stuff now.

After you complete the story is the world still open and availible?

I don't really have an issue using my main PC in my sig. 2560x1600 2xMSAA Enchanced Grass, HDAO, and everything on Ultra other than Post Processing which is on Low. (I hate hate hate the blurred crap look it creates).

The only problem I dislike is the hitching, not the stuttering. The stuttering can be fixed with a frame limiter and using vsync. The hitching is just random times it'll dive to 30 then shoot back up, it appears to be loading textures yet I am on a SSD Raid 0 setup. Then you have the odd graphical glitches where things pixelate for random reasons.

/shrug
 
I have a GTX 680 sli running 6000x1080 but I can run it smoothly only on med with no AA and no MSAA and SSAO. Is this normal or am I running low on vram (2GB)?
 
Do the scripted cut scenes seem to chug for other people? The gameplay itself is fine.
i5 @ 4.5 + ssd + 680 @ 1920x1200
 
What temps are people getting?
I am playing Far Cry 3 maxed out, 2560x1600 4xMSAA, HDAO, and everything on Ultra. Both of my GTX 680 cards get to 98% load. I turned sync off and setup a fan curve. During the game both fans went to 95%. One card stayed at 60-61C, but the other card stayed at 70-73C. That is as cool as I can get them. Boost clock on both cards stayed at 1188.9 MHz and frame rates stayed in the mid 40s.
 
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What temps are people getting?
I am playing Far Cry 3 maxed out, 2560x1600 4xMSAA, HDAO, and everything on Ultra. Both of my GTX 680 cards get to 98% load. I turned sync off and setup a fan curve. During the game both fans went to 95%. One card stayed at 60-61C, but the other card stayed at 70-73C. That is as cool as I can get them. Boost clock on both cards stayed at 1188.9 MHz and frame rates stayed in the mid 40s.

Mine are cooled by H60's so like 50c-60c and also I'm guessing your playing maxed out because you have 4GB vram! I need to upgrade so I starting a trade thread for my 2GB cards!!!!
 
Mine are cooled by H60's so like 50c-60c and also I'm guessing your playing maxed out because you have 4GB vram! I need to upgrade so I starting a trade thread for my 2GB cards!!!!

I don't think the extra VRAM matters, my GPU-Z logs show I only use 1782 MB max during game play. I wish I bought the 3 fan cards with 2GB VRAM instead of these.
 
Still waiting for the game to be completely fixed by AMD. Its very playable still, but i wouldn't say 100 % smooth. It seems to drop or hitch a frame in every 100 frames but its noticeable. Seems to be texture loading that causes this, even with a vertex 4 SSD.

Maxed it out 2560x1600 4x MSAA HDAO everything on ultra , constant 60 FPS 99% of the time. Does dip to 58-59 when loading scenes etc.

Playing with the 13.1s , Radeon Pro with DVC 60 , Lightnings GPUs @ 1400/1850 (0c under load).
 
After you complete the story is the world still open and availible?

I don't really have an issue using my main PC in my sig. 2560x1600 2xMSAA Enchanced Grass, HDAO, and everything on Ultra other than Post Processing which is on Low. (I hate hate hate the blurred crap look it creates).

The only problem I dislike is the hitching, not the stuttering. The stuttering can be fixed with a frame limiter and using vsync. The hitching is just random times it'll dive to 30 then shoot back up, it appears to be loading textures yet I am on a SSD Raid 0 setup. Then you have the odd graphical glitches where things pixelate for random reasons.

/shrug

Yes. I actually believe it gives you the option to continue or start over. Something of that nature anyway.
 
I hope you compared HDAO on the Radeon vs the Geforce

it will look different. - HDAO is inherently a Radeon optimised technique, while HBAO is Nvidia's own preferred method.

Infact, what you claimed better actually appears inherently worse in HDAO vs HBAO. The grass appears to just stop applying shadows as you get further into the grass and the lighting on the house looks entirely washed out.

Paying attention to the Covered balcony at the left, i can guarantee the HBAO is the visually correct behavior you would achieve in the real world with indirect lighting given that the lighting would be further occluded by the eves around the top.

Following onto the lighting on the Scaffold, which the darkening doesn't look that realistic at all. You have to remember that when standing in bright direct light and looking into shadows, the shadows will appear darker.
 
I hope you compared HDAO on the Radeon vs the Geforce

it will look different. - HDAO is inherently a Radeon optimised technique, while HBAO is Nvidia's own preferred method.

Infact, what you claimed better actually appears inherently worse in HDAO vs HBAO. The grass appears to just stop applying shadows as you get further into the grass and the lighting on the house looks entirely washed out.

Paying attention to the Covered balcony at the left, i can guarantee the HBAO is the visually correct behavior you would achieve in the real world with indirect lighting given that the lighting would be further occluded by the eves around the top.

Following onto the lighting on the Scaffold, which the darkening doesn't look that realistic at all. You have to remember that when standing in bright direct light and looking into shadows, the shadows will appear darker.

The official PDF on the matter also states the use of eye image plane techniques.
http://developer.download.nvidia.com/presentations/2009/GDC/NVIDIA_Effects_GDC09.pdf
 
Thanks for the review [H] - I just picked this game up this weekend and on my 690 it was choppy as all hell at first. New NV drivers and some suggestions here make it my more enjoyable at 5760x1080. Getting a fairly solid 50+ FPS now at mostly high/ultra settings. I am considering tossing in my second GTX 690 and seeing if it makes it better.
 
Has anyone tried moving their saves from Windows 7 to Windows 8? I found the saves folder in Win 7 but when I try to move them to Windows 8 the game doesn't recognize them.
 
Has anyone tried moving their saves from Windows 7 to Windows 8? I found the saves folder in Win 7 but when I try to move them to Windows 8 the game doesn't recognize them.

Have you tried cloud-saving them, and then accessing the cloud saves on Win 8? I haven't tried it, but it might work. The saves seem to be tied to the Uplay profile number (or whatever it is), which may not be the same on both OSes.
 
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