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Far Cry 4 PC performance thread

Joey Ravn

Banned
From the little I could test this morning, the game is running at constant 60 FPS in Ultra with an i5 2500K at 4.4 GHz and x2 GTX 680 2GB SLI. I haven't been able to get past the first few minutes after escaping the intro section, but performance seems to be good enough. I'm getting the weird SSAO ghosting, though.
 

jambo

Member
Shit's fucked yo

hA3cECR.jpg

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tvHyqA1.jpg

ZvapsJA.jpg

Changed every single setting and it still looks like this.

SLI GTX 670s on 344.75 drivers.




Performance is super weird too. GeForce Experience recommended running it at 1920x1200 mostly medium with some high, so I did. Got around 45-60 fps.

Then I changed to High/Very High at 2560x1600 and I get 45-60 fps...
 

riflen

Member
No matter what, I get shadows that are almost black and water + windscreens with a green tint.

When I disable SLI, it goes away.

I've tried the latest drivers, I've tried rolling back and modifying the SLI bits in inspector, but no matter what I still have those issues.

Can anyone shed any light?

GTX980s in SLI @ 1440p. The frame rate is amazing with SLI enabled, not so much when it isn't, so I sort of need it.

Thanks

SLI AFR mode is bugged. There are lots of artifacts at the moment. If you're using SMAA and SLI, don't Alt-Tab or you will see a temporal ghost image.

Mouse controls are indeed horrible. I spent probably an hour getting it playable. I did all the other recommended fixes, but also set sensitivity to 1.0 and use my mouse's dpi setting to control sensitivity. That got rid of the most jarring acceleration, but the game was still hitching around when I moved the mouse if I played at settings that gave me 50-60 fps, so I ended up cranking down settings until I could hit 70-80 fps which mitigated a lot of issues. The frame times in this game feels so incredibly inconsistent. I would have no trouble playing any other game at 50+, but one doesn't feel truly smooth unless you have 80+.

Thanks for this post. This is what's made the game playable for me now. The negative acceleration on mouse controls was just impossible to live with. As you say, a workaround is to set sensitivity slider to its lowest setting, then set DPI on the mouse to 6000 or more. Granted, lots of people can't do that, but it should help those who can.

I've almost removed all stuttering now, or greatly reduced it. It seems visuals were just set too high. These are the settings producing playable results. I basically just set what Geforce Experience suggested, but set a couple of personal preferences:

Ambient Occlusion: HBAO+
Antialiasing: SMAA
Environment: Ultra
Fur: On
Geometry: Very High
God Rays: Enhanced
Post FX: High
Shadow: Soft Shadows
Terrain: Ultra
Textures: High
Trees Relief: On
Vegetation: Ultra
Water: High

System is 780 Ti SLI and i5 3570K. Resolution is 2560x1440 and vertical sync mode is G-Sync.
 

aravuus

Member

Pfft, and people say crushed blacks makes the game lose on details. Dat pop.


Performance is super weird too. GeForce Experience recommended running it at 1920x1200 mostly medium with some high, so I did. Got around 45-60 fps.

Then I changed to High/Very High at 2560x1600 and I get 45-60 fps...

Apparently most settings have a very tiny impact on the performance. Like, "max 5fps difference between low and ultra" tiny.
 

MaLDo

Member

fatchris

Member
Shit's fucked yo



Changed every single setting and it still looks like this.

SLI GTX 670s on 344.75 drivers.




Performance is super weird too. GeForce Experience recommended running it at 1920x1200 mostly medium with some high, so I did. Got around 45-60 fps.

Then I changed to High/Very High at 2560x1600 and I get 45-60 fps...

Sounds like Far Cry 3. Changing most settings only had a marginal effect on frame rate (at least with a 760).


Far Cry 3 is one of my all-time favorite games. It's a shame I cannot justify picking this up at its release price. I really wanted to reward Ubisoft for not fucking this up, but alas, given its issues... By the time I finish my backlog of games that actually work, this will be 10 bucks on a Steam sale.
 

Lethal

Neo Member
Another day, another fail.

Uninstalled, reinstalled, disabled HID devices, verified files, restart, updated drivers etc etc.
Nothing works. All I get is the error message that Far Cry 4 has stopped.

First time this has ever happened to me with a game.
 
Mouse controls are indeed horrible. I spent probably an hour getting it playable. I did all the other recommended fixes, but also set sensitivity to 1.0 and use my mouse's dpi setting to control sensitivity. That got rid of the most jarring acceleration, but the game was still hitching around when I moved the mouse if I played at settings that gave me 50-60 fps, so I ended up cranking down settings until I could hit 70-80 fps which mitigated a lot of issues. The frame times in this game feels so incredibly inconsistent. I would have no trouble playing any other game at 50+, but one doesn't feel truly smooth unless you have 80+.

Yeah, the mouse has huge acceleration problems which is very unfortunate. I found this video of someone managing to fix it in FC3 Blood Dragon using mod tools, but it doesn't appear to work for FC4. I imagine some of the internal commands are moved around and if someone finds them and the tools work it should fix it.
 

Damian.

Banned
Another day, another fail.

Uninstalled, reinstalled, disabled HID devices, verified files, restart, updated drivers etc etc.
Nothing works. All I get is the error message that Far Cry 4 has stopped.

First time this has ever happened to me with a game.

You don't have Unified Remote software installed do you? I tried disabling all HID devices, bluetooth and M&KB software but nothing worked. Finally decided to uninstall extra utility programs one by one and this was the one that was causing my startup crashes with this game. It really sucks that you have problems like this in 2014. Ubisoft shouldn't release a game may potentially not work without modifying HID devices. This should have stopped being a thing after it was found that FEAR had performance problems until you disabled certain HID devices.
 

Deepo

Member
To you guys having trouble with the mouse, have you tried setting "Smoothness" to 0 in the gamerprofile.xml? I haven't read the whole thread, so I don't know if it's been suggested, but it seems to have made it better for me at least.
 
My machine can run this on high mostly. Runs pretty well but I think I will tweak it here and there. Going to turn the fur off cause to me it just looks weird with my settings.

So what are the main heavy performance hitters?

For reference

i7 930 OC'ed to 3.2
660 TI
8 GB ram
 

Phinor

Member
To you guys having trouble with the mouse, have you tried setting "Smoothness" to 0 in the gamerprofile.xml? I haven't read the whole thread, so I don't know if it's been suggested, but it seems to have made it better for me at least.

It's mentioned in the first post along with other similar settings. For most of us, it doesn't do anything / doesn't fix the problem.
 
There are TWO kinds of STUTTERING:

- one is the hitching that is especially annoying when you drive around. Fix is: lower textures to medium (terrible) OR edit GamerProfile.xml file, change DisableLoadingMip0="0" to DisableLoadingMip0="1"

- the other stuttering is unrelated to FPS, it is constant, and it happens even with everything turned to low, with or without vsynch. It's a constant non-smooth movement that you notice if you look at something fixed and move around it. It's as if the movement of the character is sampled lower than the fps.

Updates about this.

- MICRO-STUTTERING FIXED. This is the stuttering that is constant when fps are smooth. As I said it's noticeable if you fixed the view on a object and strafe around it. You might notice that the movement isn't smooth at all. In my case this is caused by a combination vsynch (even if off) and framerate. I was capping manually framerate a bit above 30. Instead capping it at 30 fixed this microstuttering. If you have this, it's very likely because you are somewhere between 30 and 60 fps, and so the game behaves badly. The solution is to either cap at 60 (if you can) or 30. At least this type of stuttering should be completely solved.

- Instead the hitching as you drive around that is mostly fixed through the mipmap setting: if set to 1, the hitching is much better, but you are basically down to "medium" textures.

What it seems doing: it disables loading of the highest resolution for a surface. This means that, up close, textures are at the "medium" equivalent. While for stuff that is further away the texture quality should be the same as usual.

I've tried set the game at medium, with mipmap 0 (normal), and then ultra with mipmap 1. Up close the textures are exactly the same. So it's quite possible that setting ultra and mipmap to 1 is the better option of the two, since stuff might look better and you have much less stuttering.
 

b0bbyJ03

Member
I often come to Gaf looking for answers so I figured I'd post my experience with this game and hopefully it will help someone if they need it.... so two things, I used the India VPN trick to purchase the game, it worked but I had to set up a proxy in Uplay because the game was region locked, which finally unlocked it for me.

Second, the game would not launch... just kept going to a black screen in windowed mode. i tried relaunching several times, rebooting, reinstalling, verifying files... nothing worked. Spent hours trying to get to to launch... finally i came across a reddit thread that suggested that the game has issues with USB devices. Sure enough, i unplugged my Razer Tartarus and boom, the fucking game worked... so for people having issues with the game not launching, or maybe other things like the crushed blacks... try unplugging all USB devices and see what you get. Good luck.
 
I only get crushed blacks/ghosting with the new drivers in SLI. If I disable my second 670, the new drivers run well (better than the previous by around 10fps)... Nonetheless, I want my SLI up and running. Come on green, fix it ASAP.
 

Tak3n

Banned
Another day, another fail.

Uninstalled, reinstalled, disabled HID devices, verified files, restart, updated drivers etc etc.
Nothing works. All I get is the error message that Far Cry 4 has stopped.

First time this has ever happened to me with a game.

worth a shot, go into game files right click on the .exe and choose compatibility mode, start with windows 7, then try 98 etc... see if that helps
 
What makes borderless window mode fix microstuttering? Had some problems with stuttering, went to borderless window, and now it's running flawlessly. I had to do the same thing with Skyrim.

It's still technically full screen, right? What's going on behind the scenes there?
 

turnernader

Neo Member
Is anyone else getting the black screen with a not responding error at the beginning of the game? I uninstalled and downloaded again but still nothing, I read somehting about a controller being plugged in could be an issue but all i have is a mouse and keyboard attached. Any help on this would be great.
 

Momentary

Banned
Alex Hutchinson @BangBangClick · 20h 20 hours ago

PC players! If you're online complaining about the lack of FOV control ... You pirated the game.

There's at least 2 people in this thread that outed themselves for Pirating the game. Is there a policy for them doing that here on neogaf?
 
Not getting this on PC until they patch up. Everyone kept saying things like "Well FC3 was super optimized and ran awesome so FC4 will be the same". People seem to forget that the FC3 launch was also plagued by stuttering issues for almost everyone, myself included. I was able to max the game out at near 60fps, but stuttering made it super annoying.

If I remember correctly, they released a patch a month or two later that eliminated the stuttering, and after that my experience with FC3 was perfect maxed out at 1080p on a GTX 670.

I'll wait for a similar patch for FC4. Might grab this on PS4 to play coop with friends in the meantime. It seems like the PS4 version is the "lead" version anyway, the one they are using for reviews and press.
 

Deepo

Member
Not getting this on PC until they patch up. Everyone kept saying things like "Well FC3 was super optimized and ran awesome so FC4 will be the same". People seem to forget that the FC3 launch was also plagued by stuttering issues for almost everyone, myself included. I was able to max the game out at near 60fps, but stuttering made it super annoying.

If I remember correctly, they released a patch a month or two later that eliminated the stuttering, and after that my experience with FC3 was perfect maxed out at 1080p on a GTX 670.

I'll wait for a similar patch for FC4. Might grab this on PS4 to play coop with friends in the meantime. It seems like the PS4 version is the "lead" version anyway, the one they are using for reviews and press.

Agreed, the stuttering is super annoying, and I keep telling myself to wait for a patch. Can't quite manage to stop playing though, having so much fun. Hunting Demon Fish with an assault rifle is tense!
 
Performance is super weird too. GeForce Experience recommended running it at 1920x1200 mostly medium with some high, so I did. Got around 45-60 fps.

Then I changed to High/Very High at 2560x1600 and I get 45-60 fps...

jambo, I spend a decent amount of time tweaking my 670's last night and found the following settings work well (even with just one GPU, which is how I ended up playing last night considering the crushed black/ghosting issue)

Trees relief disabled
Nvidia god ray enabled
Soft shadows enabled
Fur enabled
Ambient oculsion = SSBC
Aliasing = SMAA
Textures = very high
Geometry = very high

All other options on Ultra
And
AlphaToConverge set to 0 in .XML
 
There's at least 2 people in this thread that outed themselves for Pirating the game. Is there a policy for them doing that here on neogaf?

Heh, not only that, I also noticed some who complaint about various bugs which are only in the pirated version without the day 1 patch. But I don't think backseat modding is appreciated either. Let's just let the mods do their job.
 
There's at least 2 people in this thread that outed themselves for Pirating the game. Is there a policy for them doing that here on neogaf?

It's not exactly conclusive. If you check the full exchange on Twitter, all it means is that they haven't been online to get the latest patch. Of course, if you're using a free VPN to activate it early, standard operating procedure is to switch to offline mode until it officially launches in your region, so it doesn't recheck and lock itself back up again.
 

Tak3n

Banned
There's at least 2 people in this thread that outed themselves for Pirating the game. Is there a policy for them doing that here on neogaf?

umm I would not be so quick to try to get members banned, if I recall total biscuit in his PC port video mentioned he could not see FOV doing any changes...

and I highly doubt he has a prated copy
 

fade_

Member
I simply can't get a stable framerate on this game... It's really annoying.


I tried to do the "Game Optimize" thing from the GeForce Experience and it capped my fps to 30...gg Nvidia.

Try either turning off vsync all together or leaving it on and turning on triple buffering in advanced. That won't keep it at 30.
 
Whats the best way to set a frame rate cap on an Nvidia gpu? I'd like to lock the game at 30 (single gpu) or 60 (when sli starts working) in an attempt to mitigate the games stuttering.
 

Zeth

Member
Any single 970 users playing at 1440? Looking for a good settings compromise. Though I'm tempted to switch out to my 1080 monitor temporarily for this game.

Whats the best way to set a frame rate cap on an Nvidia gpu? I'd like to lock the game at 30 (single gpu) or 60 (when sli starts working) in an attempt to mitigate the games stuttering.
If you have Afterburner/Riva Tuner you should be able to cap it globally that way.
 

riflen

Member
What makes borderless window mode fix microstuttering? Had some problems with stuttering, went to borderless window, and now it's running flawlessly. I had to do the same thing with Skyrim.

It's still technically full screen, right? What's going on behind the scenes there?

Crudely put, triple buffering.

Borderless Windowed mode is not full screen as far as Windows is concerned. In Windows, if you run your application in full screen mode, the application controls how its rendered to the display device.

From Windows Vista onwards, the OS has a desktop composition feature. If your application runs in a windowed mode, the output is first rendered to a separate memory surface, then rendered into a desktop image. This is controlled by the Desktop Window Manager.

This behaviour means that the game gets the use of an extra buffer to render to, compared to the two buffer system most commonly used by game developers. A third buffer can even out the delivery of frames to the display, in some cases this helps remove hitching or stuttering in the rendering out of frames. The computer basically gets "more time" to create its frames before they have to be shown on screen.

The downside to this is that latency between what's happening in the game and what's shown on screen will increase. This may or may not be noticeable by the player. This is my guess as to what's happening anyway. I don't have the tools to prove it.
 

Jharp

Member
Did a bit more running around and still getting no FPS issues running it on Ultra on my 670, but I haven't jumped back in after installing the latest nVidia drivers. Anyone else getting this lucky?

I did suffer a very noticeable drop in frames when the
avalanche
hit at the end of the first mission, but besides that it's been smooth sailing. And I'm guessing those don't happen too often for me to worry about it anyways.
 
Wait, there's a legit FOV slider? I found some sort of slider in the options, but it looks like it just changed my fish eye view when I maxed it out. Lowering it all the way didn't make much of a difference, either. Is there another one?

I've been playing single player offline - do I need to start an online campaign for the Day 1 patch to download or will that happen automatically for just buying it on Steam?
 

elelunicy

Member
It's not exactly conclusive. If you check the full exchange on Twitter, all it means is that they haven't been online to get the latest patch. Of course, if you're using a free VPN to activate it early, standard operating procedure is to switch to offline mode until it officially launches in your region, so it doesn't recheck and lock itself back up again.

I don't know. I pre-loaded the game and the latest patch was already included in it.
 
Crudely put, triple buffering.

Borderless Windowed mode is not full screen as far as Windows is concerned. In Windows, if you run your application in full screen mode, the application controls how its rendered to the display device.

From Windows Vista onwards, the OS has a desktop composition feature. If your application runs in a windowed mode, the output is first rendered to a separate memory surface, then rendered into a desktop image. This is controlled by the Desktop Window Manager.

This behaviour means that the game gets the use of an extra buffer to render to, compared to the two buffer system most commonly used by game developers. A third buffer can even out the delivery of frames to the display, in some cases this helps remove hitching or stuttering in the rendering out of frames. The computer basically gets "more time" to create its frames before they have to be shown on screen.

The downside to this is that latency between what's happening in the game and what's shown on screen will increase. This may or may not be noticeable by the player. This is my guess as to what's happening anyway. I don't have the tools to prove it.

Interesting. Thanks for the explanation. Haven't noticed any latency, so that's a plus. I'll stick with it.
 

b0uncyfr0

Member
So DisableLoadingMip0 should be set to 0 to get the better textures? Wonder how its affected by the texture setting..
 

Qassim

Member
Getting great performance here on my 2x GTX 780 SLI - but I've got this awful black crush that is ruining the image to the point where it's sometimes even hard to see what is actually going on.

Hoping that gets fixed soon.
 
So DisableLoadingMip0 should be set to 0 to get the better textures? Wonder how its affected by the texture setting..

If you set it to 0, the game will use a set of textures ranging from worst to best for rendering the scene from far to close, with the "best" texture defined by the texture setting, I think.

Thanks to Maldo for explaining it some pages back. Correct me if I understood incorrectly.
 

Qassim

Member
The wording makes it seem like it's Geforce exclusive.

I suspect it's part of the marketing. The entire point is that NVIDIA get the brand pay-off when including features like this, even if it works on AMD cards, they'll want to highlight it was designed for NVIDIA cards by NVIDIA.
 

riflen

Member
The wording makes it seem like it's Geforce exclusive.

Yes, well, the guy who wrote that post probably doesn't know the meaning of the words he's using and whoever who gave him the info likely made a mistake. Andy already confirmed that only TXAA requires a NVIDIA GPU.

Like those bears need any more confidence.

It's the fricken honey badgers I'm concerned about. Two or three of those guys at a time are a nightmare. With this SLI "crushed blacks" bug, running around at night time is suicide.
 
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