Please share how!
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Far Cry 3 PC performance thread
- Thread starter Salsa
- Start date
Please share how!
Initial thoughts after tinkering with the game on my 560Ti for an hour or so:
Everyone who can should be using DX11 mode, and they should also be setting D3D11MultithreadedRendering to 1 in their Documents\My Games\Far Cry 3\GamerProfile.xml. Testing DX9 mode vs. DX11 in the village near the start of the game (and surrounding areas), I've found that, given equal settings, DX11 mode with multi-threaded rendering is a flat 5 - 10 FPS performance boost. I've seen people in this thread talking about using DX9 mode for performance reasons, my experience has been the exact opposite.
Set Post FX quality to medium at most, unless you really like motion blur (which only activates at the Very High or Ultra settings). The only difference I've noticed between medium and high Post FX is FXAA implementation, if anything else changes it's not noticeable at all. Yet for some reason raising the setting from medium to high lowers my frame rate by 10 or more depending on the area. Much, much better to set it to medium and use MSAA + Alpha Coverage for better quality and performance.
The SSAO and SBAO look absolutely silly and should be avoided. If you can't afford SDAO, just disable ambient occlusion entirely (set SSAOLevel to 0 in GamerProfile.xml). That said, SDAO looks good.
Big performance difference between High and Very High Shadow quality, not so big quality difference. If you're having performance issues, this would be the first setting I'd turn down after Post FX.
Everyone who can should be using DX11 mode, and they should also be setting D3D11MultithreadedRendering to 1 in their Documents\My Games\Far Cry 3\GamerProfile.xml. Testing DX9 mode vs. DX11 in the village near the start of the game (and surrounding areas), I've found that, given equal settings, DX11 mode with multi-threaded rendering is a flat 5 - 10 FPS performance boost. I've seen people in this thread talking about using DX9 mode for performance reasons, my experience has been the exact opposite.
Set Post FX quality to medium at most, unless you really like motion blur (which only activates at the Very High or Ultra settings). The only difference I've noticed between medium and high Post FX is FXAA implementation, if anything else changes it's not noticeable at all. Yet for some reason raising the setting from medium to high lowers my frame rate by 10 or more depending on the area. Much, much better to set it to medium and use MSAA + Alpha Coverage for better quality and performance.
The SSAO and SBAO look absolutely silly and should be avoided. If you can't afford SDAO, just disable ambient occlusion entirely (set SSAOLevel to 0 in GamerProfile.xml). That said, SDAO looks good.
Big performance difference between High and Very High Shadow quality, not so big quality difference. If you're having performance issues, this would be the first setting I'd turn down after Post FX.
Castor Krieg
Banned
i7 Q6600
560Ti
I put 1920x1080, all on High, SSAO, but I think I should drop some options. Howering around 30FPS.
So, what will give me the most performance boost? Start with just turning on DX9?
560Ti
I put 1920x1080, all on High, SSAO, but I think I should drop some options. Howering around 30FPS.
So, what will give me the most performance boost? Start with just turning on DX9?
Damn I haven't changed to multithreading in the .xml, will do with great prejudice later today!
Drop PostFX, Shadows to medium, disable SSAO in the GamerProfile.xml unless you use HDAO (which looks great but has a bigger performance hit).
Sorry, im so busy tweaking the game.
Put this: Post>
<quality GameDepthOfField="0" CinematicDepthOfField="0" FXAALevel="0" CloudShadows="1" MotionBlur="0" id="ultrahigh" />
</Post>
Here:
You have to put the setting you have on PostFxQuality here " id="ultrahigh" " in my case Ultrahigh.
And for the SMAA you have to run the game in DX9.
Edit: And make sure to put the cfg on Read-Only before you start the game.
Put this: Post>
<quality GameDepthOfField="0" CinematicDepthOfField="0" FXAALevel="0" CloudShadows="1" MotionBlur="0" id="ultrahigh" />
</Post>
Here:
You have to put the setting you have on PostFxQuality here " id="ultrahigh" " in my case Ultrahigh.
And for the SMAA you have to run the game in DX9.
Edit: And make sure to put the cfg on Read-Only before you start the game.
Backfoggen
Banned
I dunno but the game seems so much more visually appealing with SSAO turned completely off.
Hm, don't think I'd want to lose HDAO, it looks so good. How did you remove the HUD?
I have the same card as you, with an i5 3570k. My settings right now are 1080p, DX11 mode (with D3D11MultithreadedRendering="1"), 4x MSAA, Enhanced Alpha To Coverage, SDAO, High Texture quality, High Ambient Lighting quality, High Shadow quality, Medium Post FX quality, Very High Geometry quality, Very High Vegetation quality, High Terrain quality, Very High Water quality, and High Environment quality.
Game runs pretty smooth in the first quest area, usually around 50 - 60 FPS with some spots being higher or lower as expected. Let me know if your experience is substantially different, I'm curious why this game seems to be performing so erratically across different hardware configurations.
Wait... 4x MSAA? That can't be right. With the same card and worse settings (everything on high, shadows+postfx on medium), I lose like 10-20 fps if I enable any sort of MSAA. I'll try enabling multithreading later, although it shouldn't have THAT much of an effect.
Castor Krieg
Banned
Great tips, thanks! Will try this after I get home from work.
dark_inferno
Member
Are the Nvidia Beta Driver recommended for this game or should i wait until the normal drivers?
MagicWithEarvin
Member
Yeah, just 2xMSAA on my 660ti/3570k brings me down to 45FPS. At the moment, I'm locked at 1080p/60FPS with FXAA, multisample enabled in Nvidia CP, SSAO and everything maxed except for Post FX (low). I'm going to get rid of FXAA and SSAO and hopefully get something better, but still maintaining 60FPS.
Just set the SSAO level on 4,5 or 6 in the config.
And for the hud, just press prtscn and it will take a hudless screenshot.
Lots of the tweaking tips over in the Guru3D thread, http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=345687&page=53
Still can't wait for someone to figure out a way to disable the damn HUD, I'd kill a small kitten for that right now.
Still can't wait for someone to figure out a way to disable the damn HUD, I'd kill a small kitten for that right now.
PostFX also affects the quality of the SSAO, is there something for that?
Yeah I posted a comparison of DX11 HDAO and DX9 5&6 on the last page, DX9 doesn't look nearly as good unfortunately.
Anyone having microstuttering issues? Game generaly runs fine on my i5 2500/8GB RAM/560Ti 2GB, but no matter how high fps goes, I always get small stuttering effect.
Something like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b171isQbROo
This guy says to set maxfps to 45, but I have yet to try this.
Something like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b171isQbROo
This guy says to set maxfps to 45, but I have yet to try this.
Cannon Goose
Member
I showed quite the opposite in terms of performance gain. I'm on a 560Ti here as well and I measured the frame rate while facing inland from the beach and got these numbers:
All used everything on High except for PostFX and Shadows which were on Medium. Driver FXAA was used instead of the built-in FXAA.
DX11 with Multi-threading and SSAO: 55fps
DX11 with Multi-threading OFF and SSAO: 63fps
DX9 with SSAO: 73fps
Kinda backwards, but hey, sometimes that's PC gaming for you.
I second this. Multi-threading actually decreased my fps a bit. 2500k @ 4.5 GHz.
IcyBlueStrawberry
Member
Anyone know how to get D3DOverrider to work with Uplay?
I hate having to login to a service after logging in to a service as it is. Why the damn thing won't let me manually add vsync is a mystery.
I hate having to login to a service after logging in to a service as it is. Why the damn thing won't let me manually add vsync is a mystery.
You don't have to do anything special, it just works. I just have D3DO on autostart and it works automatically on all my games. You don't have to add them manually or anything.
2500k does not support hyper-threading for each of it's 4 cores. 2600k does though I think. This is possibly why?
It's a GPU feature for Nvidia cards and was removed from the game with the day 1 patch, so clearly it's not ready for use.
Yeah, it was removed for a reason. It caused some instability for me.
SJRB
Gold Member
I had this when I first started, switching to DX9 fixed it for me.
I'm not a tech wizzard so I don't know how, but all I know is the game runs so much better for me in DX9.
IcyBlueStrawberry
Member
Doing so initially resolved my stuttering issues, but introduced a horrible flickering issue lol.
Then, for no reason, the game went back to refusing to launch with D3DOverrider half of the time and the stuttering came back.
I can get the game to run with minimal stuttering, I can get the game to run with a solid framerate, I can get the game to run without flickering, and I can get the game to run with D3DOverrider, but I can't seem to have all four things working at the same time
.ashbash159
Member
My Quad Core, 4GB RAM and AMD 5770 are barely allowing me to run this game.
Absolute lowest settings at 1080p I get shitty framerate. 720p doesn't seem much better either...
Poop.
Absolute lowest settings at 1080p I get shitty framerate. 720p doesn't seem much better either...
Poop.
LemonGremlin
Member
I've got my eye on that ShowDiamondsInMap toggle. Looks like you can at least modify what is shown on the GUI to some extent.There's even some cheats and slowmotion tweaks
Baloonatic
Member
Am I the only getting freezes every 10 minutes or so? Game completely locks up but the music carries on. Have to end the process.
LemonGremlin
Member
I have the exact same problem.
Mine freezes, then minimises to (Win7) desktop. The FC3 icon is still there, the music is still on but there's no way of getting back to it. There's no error message so it's a bitch to track down. Apart from that it's a solid 60fps most of the time.
I changed down to DirectX9 last night and I could play for maybe 30 mins. It would freeze for maybe 2-3 seconds at a time during a Trials of Rakyat mission (before carrying on) but I think that might be a separate issue. So I 'm not sure if Dx9 fixed the error or not.
If switching resolution doesn't help it sounds like you're CPU bottlenecked?
legacyzero
Banned
Oh sorry it took so long. I fell asleep
Gigabyte 670
i5 3570k
8 GB of memory.
And those are all at stock. I imagine when I finally get the bravery to figure out how to OC, I might get even better performance.
noomi
Member
Hmm, strange, I did not even think of that.
So while I'm in-game I change MSAA, quit to main menu and re-start my game? Seems strange, never had to do that for AA options before. I'll give that a shot after work, thanks.
Cannon Goose
Member
Interesting, if you use the in-game screenshot button (print screen) it removes all HUD elements and it can also capture Nvidia driver FXAA.
Screens are where the config file is, C:\Users\Your Name\Documents\My Games\Far Cry 3\Screenshots
Screens are where the config file is, C:\Users\Your Name\Documents\My Games\Far Cry 3\Screenshots
legacyzero
Banned
Theres.... in game screenshots? Huh...
Felix Lighter
Member
I would suggest anyone with an AMD card to use RadeonPro to force triple buffered vsync instead of D3DOverrider. I find that in some cases where D3DOverrider failed to work, whatever RadeonPro's implementation is did.
Baloonatic
Member
Switched to DX9 and my game seems to have stopped crashing every 10 minutes. Very strange but to be honest I'm noticing zero difference graphically anyway.
Also, I would kill for a quicksave button.
Also, I would kill for a quicksave button.
dark_inferno
Member
This game saves every time you breathe out. Get a side objective, run in and kill a commander with knife ( ... Again, very broad spectrum of missions thar' ) get noticed, run for the commander and knife him, get shot and you spawn a mile away with the commander dead and you can be on your merry way.
Baloonatic
Member
Thanks so much! I didn't see it listed under the controls in the options, did you just figure it out or does it tell you somewhere?
Baloonatic
Member
Hasn't been my experience so far but I've been doing lots of wandering around without doing objectives or anything. Lost a bunch of crafted stuff earlier when my game crashed.
dark_inferno
Member
Figured it out... i had ShowFPS on but couldnt see it so i thought it would be a key or something but no... just found Quick Load F11 and Quick Save F9... F1-F4 are menu buttons.