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Far Cry 4 PC performance thread

knerl

Member
So any performance improvements with this patch? Is the stuttering gone??? sighs.

We've reached the level as one would expect in a game that was just released.
Stuttering is not gone. If you can't keep the framerate at 60fps it stutters. If you go beyond 60fps it stutters in different ways. No matter what you do or how fast it runs it still stutters while driving around.

If you however manage to run it at a more or less consistent 60fps and lock it at that with for example Rivatuner it's very smooth with above exceptions.
 

Alo81

Low Poly Gynecologist
How can I completely get rid of my save and start over fresh? I tried uninstalling the game, deleting my local save and turning off cloud saving, but upon reinstalling the game, it loads up my glitched save that doesn't allow manual saving. I would like to start over completely to see if it clears up this issue.

My recommendation would be to delete local save, disable your internet, start up a new save. When that new save is created, right click and set it to read only, then reconnecting to internet and booting up again.
 
I had to cap my framerate to 30 in Nvidia Inspector. Thats the only way I can get 95% stutter free gameplay.

On the plus side, I can put everything to Ultra on my GTX 670 and run at smooth 30fps.

If I unlock framerate, even running on High at 50ish fps there is extremely annoying stuttering. So 30 it is....
 

holygeesus

Banned
Nope, still plays like shit here after the latest update, so it has broken something for me. Uninstalled and Ubi and go and do one if they think I'm buying another of their half-assed games again. Too many games to play and not enough patience.
 

Damian.

Banned
The latest couple of patches have also borked my performance. I get upper 40's and lower 50's most of the time with GPU usage hovering barely above 50% on a 970. Ubisoft is such a shitty developer.
 

MaLDo

Member
Those with worse performance in newer patches, delele your xml config file. Custom graphics presets of older versions can produce lower framerates. Further that, I think soft shadows work in a different way and those can reduce your framerate. Disable them to test.

The real fucking problem for every Ubisoft game since Watch Dogs is all of them share the same streaming layer that is designed around a 33 ms frametime. You can bruteforce a lot of things but this is very hard to do. I found a compromise where playing watch dogs at 50 fps/50 hz can avoid every hitches but the problem must be fixed in the root if they want to avoid a lot of pc gamers displeasure.
 

zXe

Member
I've given up with this game completely. Sounds like the game still has issues and it's on 1.08... I just don't care. I will say this though, Far Cry 4 isn't a bad game, it's a really fun game. I got to the second area of the game but I kind of stopped playing for a bit, but still checked this thread to see if there's been performance improvements. When I see people are getting worse performance than before, it really concerns me and kills any motivation I have to return to it, which is a damned shamed.
 

knerl

Member
If they could just fix the damn streaming issues. Driving a vehicle or running on foot for that matter keeps resulting in GPU usage drops. Hence stutters. Seriously. It isn't fun when a large portion of what the game is about makes the screen freeze ever so often.
 

knerl

Member
My 970 G1 Gaming from Gigabyte is getting a higher core clock than it should.
It's supposed to have a 1329MHz boost clock, but according to msi afterburner it's running at 1380MHz. GPU-Z reports the boost clock as 1329MHz.

Is there something wrong going on here?
 
Pretty insane yeah. At least 10fps on my end.
Looks really good though but hardly anyone cares about shadows nowadays.

i havent measured fps impact yet, but with vsync and smaa with all settings maxed and ultra shadows, my gpu usage is like 45% in the opening area after the car crash. turning on pcss sends gpu usage into the 90s.
 

Saintruski

Unconfirmed Member
MAXED 1080p60 solid on lock (66-103 unlocked no hitches at 1080p maxed)

1440p 46fps low 69fps high, maxed no hitches

4K maxed but no AA 28-46 FPS, no hitches


Specs

Case: Corsair 900D
Motherboard: ASUS Rampage V Extreme
CPU: Intel 5960x @ 4.6GHz
GPU: EVGA 980 Classfied @ 1650MHz
RAM: Corsair Dominator Platinum 16GB DDR4 @ 3000MHz
PSU: EVGA 1600 G2
Raid Card: SUPERMICRO AOC-SAS2LP-MV8
OS and Software Drive: Samsung M.2 XP941 512GB
Game Drives: 3 x Intel 730 Series 480GB Raid0
Mass Storage: 8 x Seagate 3TB Drives
 

PnCIa

Member
Okay, so i choose FC4 for my Gtx 970 download code, everything runs great or rather...as good as expected.
But is TXAA supposed to look like total shit? Its more blurry than SMAA, i thought this is some awesome AA tech but it just looks messy. I am running the newest whql driver btw, so everything is in order there. God i wish for some proper transparency AA.
 

bobeth

Member
Okay, so i choose FC4 for my Gtx 970 download code, everything runs great or rather...as good as expected.
But is TXAA supposed to look like total shit? Its more blurry than SMAA, i thought this is some awesome AA tech but it just looks messy. I am running the newest whql driver btw, so everything is in order there. God i wish for some proper transparency AA.
TXAA is a lot more blurry than SMAA, but it gets rid of most of the shimmering caused by aliasing. I prefer SMAA, although TXAA looks fantastic if you're a bit drunk..
 

Seanspeed

Banned
Okay, so i choose FC4 for my Gtx 970 download code, everything runs great or rather...as good as expected.
But is TXAA supposed to look like total shit? Its more blurry than SMAA, i thought this is some awesome AA tech but it just looks messy. I am running the newest whql driver btw, so everything is in order there. God i wish for some proper transparency AA.
Yes, TXAA introduces a fair amount of blur in exchange for very good temporal antialiasing. I find its worth it in this game, as the alternatives look a bit nasty.

Anyways, my performance is pretty reasonable. 3570k@4.2Ghz, GTX970 and I get a somewhat consistent 60fps at 1080p with almost everything maxed, with dips usually keeping it in the 55-60fps zone and only rarely getting worse than that. I tried things at 1440p and I was down to about 45-48fps average.

Really, my biggest problem is that the game just wont stay fullscreen. Its mostly ok on-foot, but when in menus, cutscenes or driving, its constantly switching to windowed mode. I have this same problem with a couple other games, but unlike most of those, switching to Borderless Windowed does not solve it and instead blows the picture up for some reason. I don't think its a 'oh Ubisoft' issue as I do experience it with other games, but its still really annoying and I don't know what the fuck is causing it.
 

PnCIa

Member
Thanks for your replies :)
Well i cant really see *any* advantage of TXAA honestly, the trees shimmer a lot more with TXAA than with SMAA :/
I have to read a bit about the technology behind it, but i expected a lot more tbh.
 

SliChillax

Member
Thanks for your replies :)
Well i cant really see *any* advantage of TXAA honestly, the trees shimmer a lot more with TXAA than with SMAA :/
I have to read a bit about the technology behind it, but i expected a lot more tbh.

TXAA is implemented horribly in this game. In games like AC Black Flag it works wonderfully.
 
Txaa only works when standing still. During any movement it breaks and reverts to msaa, hece the shimner. It also makes me laugh when people say txaa in this title is more blurry than smaa. Its the exact opposite for the above reason. Msaa/txaa are abysmal in thia title
 

Seanspeed

Banned
Txaa only works when standing still. During any movement it breaks and reverts to msaa, hece the shimner. It also makes me laugh when people say txaa in this title is more blurry than smaa. Its the exact opposite for the above reason. Msaa/txaa are abysmal in thia title
I did notice a lot of shimmer so that would explain it. Haven't actually used SMAA yet but that's the preferable option then? That's pretty weak. Might see what I can turn down to get good performance at 1440p then...
 
I did notice a lot of shimmer so that would explain it. Haven't actually used SMAA yet but that's the preferable option then? That's pretty weak. Might see what I can turn down to get good performance at 1440p then...

yeah the smaa is the best option available in the pc version. turn down soft shadows, they look good but the performance impact is absolutely unreasonable

153l31.jpg

2rpaxq.jpg


soft v ultra
 

riflen

Member
I did notice a lot of shimmer so that would explain it. Haven't actually used SMAA yet but that's the preferable option then? That's pretty weak. Might see what I can turn down to get good performance at 1440p then...

If you have a single GPU, SMAA is the best choice for this game in my opinion. As others have said, TXAA is implemented in a manner that makes it pointless and MSAA has no alpha coverage, causing shimmering constantly because you're always staring at foliage. Plus the performance penalty is crazy.

Unfortunately, if you're using SLI and the FC4 bits, then SMAA is fucked and causes a weird frame retention bug as soon as you use the map or menus. Personally, I've got this game running just right for me (780 Ti x 2 + 3570K) by playing at 2560x1440 and forcing FXAA through NVCP.

Something else that completely solved stuttering for my system was a RAM upgrade (the patches helped, but not solved it). 1333Mhz to 1866Mhz DIMMs. I think this and some other Ubisoft games really hit the CPU memory bus hard in SLI. There must be a lot of data moving to and from system RAM.
 

Seanspeed

Banned
yeah the smaa is the best option available in the pc version. turn down soft shadows, they look good but the performance impact is absolutely unreasonable
Definitely on the shadows. Its always the first thing to get turned down anyways, cuz I'm usually happy so long as they don't look like a pixelated mess.
 

JaseC

gave away the keys to the kingdom.
Here is some potentially good news:

UPlay 5.0 is here

  • ...
  • Game Version Selector (currently not available to general public)
  • ...

At least they are adding features :D

In all likelihood the feature will only apply to Ubi's new releases going forward, but being able to roll back would benefit a myriad of Far Cry 4 owners a great deal.
 
Sorry to resurrect this thread guys but i have a FC4 PC performance question. Hopefully someone can help.

I have the game fully updated along with the latest Nvidia drivers.

I'm getting a momentary complete frame rate drop that last for around 1 or 2 seconds, its infuriating. i get it about once every 2-3 mins.

I have 2 780Ti but i get this issue whether i have SLI on or off.

Rest of my Rig:

1440p Rog Swift
16GB DDR 3 RAM
4770k @ 4.4 (watercooled)
840 Evo SSD
Windows 7

I've tried changing the changing the following in profile.xml but it didnt make any differnece at all:

Change DisableLoadingMip0="0" to DisableLoadingMip0="1" and change GPUMaxBufferedFrames="0" to GPUMaxBufferedFrames="1"

Halp GFA HALP!
 

riflen

Member
Sorry to resurrect this thread guys but i have a FC4 PC performance question. Hopefully someone can help.

I have the game fully updated along with the latest Nvidia drivers.

I'm getting a momentary complete frame rate drop that last for around 1 or 2 seconds, its infuriating. i get it about once every 2-3 mins.

I have 2 780Ti but i get this issue whether i have SLI on or off.

Rest of my Rig:

1440p Rog Swift
16GB DDR 3 RAM
4770k @ 4.4 (watercooled)
840 Evo SSD
Windows 7

I've tried changing the changing the following in profile.xml but it didnt make any differnece at all:

Change DisableLoadingMip0="0" to DisableLoadingMip0="1" and change GPUMaxBufferedFrames="0" to GPUMaxBufferedFrames="1"

Halp GFA HALP!

This sounds like it could be another application taking CPU time on a regular interval. Check what you have running besides the game and try playing with Uplay in Offline mode.
 

knerl

Member
Sorry to resurrect this thread guys but i have a FC4 PC performance question. Hopefully someone can help.

I have the game fully updated along with the latest Nvidia drivers.

I'm getting a momentary complete frame rate drop that last for around 1 or 2 seconds, its infuriating. i get it about once every 2-3 mins.

I have 2 780Ti but i get this issue whether i have SLI on or off.

Rest of my Rig:

1440p Rog Swift
16GB DDR 3 RAM
4770k @ 4.4 (watercooled)
840 Evo SSD
Windows 7

I've tried changing the changing the following in profile.xml but it didnt make any differnece at all:

Change DisableLoadingMip0="0" to DisableLoadingMip0="1" and change GPUMaxBufferedFrames="0" to GPUMaxBufferedFrames="1"

Halp GFA HALP!

1. The game engine does this regardless of settings, specs etc. to some extent.
2. Which settings are you using? Check your VRAM usage. On ultra it can use more than 3GB which could be the culprit on a 780Ti.
3. Possibly it could be Windows 7. I remember I had a similar issue with Metro Last Light in Win 7 back in the days. Switched to Win 8.0 and the problem was gone. Double checked my software configs twice before I switched too.
 

laxu

Member
Sorry to resurrect this thread guys but i have a FC4 PC performance question. Hopefully someone can help.

I have the game fully updated along with the latest Nvidia drivers.

I'm getting a momentary complete frame rate drop that last for around 1 or 2 seconds, its infuriating. i get it about once every 2-3 mins.

I have 2 780Ti but i get this issue whether i have SLI on or off.
*snip*

Don't make any XML changes. Instead delete (or preferably move them to another folder for safe keeping) the XML files and let the game recreate them.

Turn Shadows down to Ultra if you were using soft shadows, those are a pretty big performance hit.

You can use SMAA for antialiasing with SweetFX as afaik the game's own SMAA is still broken in SLI.

As long as you're running the game off a SSD it should be running smoothly.
 

knerl

Member
Don't make any XML changes. Instead delete (or preferably move them to another folder for safe keeping) the XML files and let the game recreate them.

Turn Shadows down to Ultra if you were using soft shadows, those are a pretty big performance hit.

You can use SMAA for antialiasing with SweetFX as afaik the game's own SMAA is still broken in SLI.

As long as you're running the game off a SSD it should be running smoothly.

Just want to say that running it on a SSD instead of a fast (lets say 7200rpm) mechanical disk doesn't make any difference at all except for the load times. The stuttering thanks to the engine's streaming issues are still present. Has anyone managed to get sweetfx to work on win 8.1 by the way? Without radeon pro that is?
 

laxu

Member
Just want to say that running it on a SSD instead of a fast (lets say 7200rpm) mechanical disk doesn't make any difference at all except for the load times. The stuttering thanks to the engine's streaming issues are still present. Has anyone managed to get sweetfx to work on win 8.1 by the way? Without radeon pro that is?

I noticed the stuttering went away by playing the game from a SSD. I use SweetFX with boulotaur injector.
 

knerl

Member
I noticed the stuttering went away by playing the game from a SSD. I use SweetFX with boulotaur injector.

Then something must have been wrong with your HDD. Tried it on a mechanical and SSD. No difference except for load times. Did you update the game after the disk switch?
 

Alo81

Low Poly Gynecologist
Then something must have been wrong with your HDD. Tried it on a mechanical and SSD. No difference except for load times. Did you update the game after the disk switch?

There are a million different things at play here, are you really that confident in saying that they're just completely wrong with their first hand experience simply because you didn't have the exact same result? That seems awfully bullheaded.
 

knerl

Member
There are a million different things at play here, are you really that confident in saying that they're just completely wrong with their first hand experience simply because you didn't have the exact same result? That seems awfully bullheaded.

Seeing as how a working HDD does NOT cause stuttering I narrowed his down to being faulty if the switch made a change yes. The game was optimized for mechanical disks so either the disk was faulty or it was a combination with a game update, OS update, old settings overriding wanted values etc. after the switch. Since I've tried playing it on both types of disks I am confident.

Being skeptical for the sake of it seems awfully bullheaded to me.
There aren't a million things at play here. It's down to hardware and software. Running standardized configs with a standard OS narrows the issues down quite a lot.
 

Kezen

Banned
I noticed the stuttering went away by playing the game from a SSD. I use SweetFX with boulotaur injector.

I have the game on my SSD and there was stutter near launch while I was gliding. It does not get rid of it 100%.

No more stuttering now. Runs really smooth.
 

sgs2008

Member
Just wanted to check if people with similar rigs are getting similar performance to me, Im running game at 1440p with sli 780 tis everything maxed except shadows (soft shadows gives me regular drops to around 45) on ultra and smaa getting mostly 60 fps but it does drop down to about 50 in some scenes. IS this about right, i was expecting slightly better performance tbh.
 

Alo81

Low Poly Gynecologist
Just wanted to check if people with similar rigs are getting similar performance to me, Im running game at 1440p with sli 780 tis everything maxed except shadows (soft shadows gives me regular drops to around 45) on ultra and smaa getting mostly 60 fps but it does drop down to about 50 in some scenes. IS this about right, i was expecting slightly better performance tbh.

Whats your CPU? I've got a 970 and have found I can basically max settings reaching typically 85% GPU usage, but still get framedrops because one of my CPU cores hits 100%.
 

knerl

Member
Stuttering while driving around is pretty much gone!
Before 1.9 it always stuttered with regular interval while driving from one area to another.
If you logged your GPU usage it always dropped from ~90 to ~60-70% when this happened.
The result was a frozen screen that lasted for a split second. Really ruined the experience and gameplay.

As of 1.9 this is to 99% solved. I've seen the GPU usage drop while driving around from one area to another, but the effect is barely noticeable and it rarely happens. So as of now you don't get a headache just by driving around in the landscape.

It still stutters if you can't keep a solid 60 fps though. And if you go beyond 60fps other vehicles will stutter while in motion.
 

Seanspeed

Banned
I haven't played in a couple days, but it seemed like the last couple days I played, it all the sudden started going haywire on the framerate. Before I was at a mostly consistent 60fps, vsync'd and it was fine. Then all the sudden I started getting drops that brought it down to 30fps for more than just small periods of time. And turning vsync off would result in decent framerate most of the time but it had some stutter and a slight amount of tearing.

I don't know what happened. And how do I figure out what version I'm on or anything like that in UPlay? I don't notice it ever updating anything and cant find any info updates.
 

dex3108

Member
I haven't played in a couple days, but it seemed like the last couple days I played, it all the sudden started going haywire on the framerate. Before I was at a mostly consistent 60fps, vsync'd and it was fine. Then all the sudden I started getting drops that brought it down to 30fps for more than just small periods of time. And turning vsync off would result in decent framerate most of the time but it had some stutter and a slight amount of tearing.

I don't know what happened. And how do I figure out what version I'm on or anything like that in UPlay? I don't notice it ever updating anything and cant find any info updates.

In main menu there is version in down right/left corner I think
 

Seanspeed

Banned
In main menu there is version in down right/left corner I think
Thanks. I tried starting it up and it prompted to me to update, so I'm guessing this is the 1.9 one. Hopefully it goes back to how it was, because its very strange that things started messing up all on their own and it wasn't down to any patch or anything. Performance wasn't perfect for me before but I was quite happy with it.
 

Valravn

Member
I get random crashes. Far Cry 4 crashes to a window and i need to stop it from task manager. I seem to happen all the time now during the mission where you chase Pagan Min.

How can i fix this?

i7 4790k
16 GB ram
Asus 980 GTX Strix
SoundBlaster Z

I dont use SweetFX.
 

cripterion

Member
Game is super smooth now with all settings set to Ultra and TXAA on but goddamn they broke something again with SLI and I get some heavy flickering. Only fix I found was going borderless and then back to fullscreen.

Was ready to get a good gaming session going seeing as I have this and Unity and never really played them... So I play Far Cry 4, I unlock several stuff after hunting animals, and the fucking game just disconnects cause of UBI servers. I go back to the game, it didn't save at all....

Go to AC: Unity, play some coop with 3 other people. This is kinda fun! I hop on a ledge, and get stuck.

Fuck it, think I'm never touching this ever again.
 
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