Man, it really seems that Ubisoft can’t stop screwing things up. Yesterday, a video came to our attention suggesting that the latest Far Cry 4 update for PS4 removed the God-Ray effects that were previously available to it. Instead of posting this article straight away, we decided to hold our horses until we got confirmation from a number of sources. And today, we can safely say that these effects were indeed removed from it.
For what is worth, these enhanced God-Ray effects were never present in the Xbox One version. And strangely enough, after the latest update they are not present even in the PS4 version, despite the fact that they were present prior to this particular update.
At this point, we are uncertain whether this is a bug or an intentional removal. We’ll give Ubisoft the benefit of the doubt, at least for the time being.
The interesting part here is that those enhanced God-Ray effects were introduced by Ubisoft’s collaboration with NVIDIA. And while those effects work fine on AMD GPUs in Far Cry 4 PC, they could very well be ‘considered’ PC-only features that should not be present at all in the console versions.
So, there are currently three scenarios:
a) Those effects – that did not affect performance mind you – were removed for parity reasons between PS4 and Xbox One
b) Those effects were removed because they were considered PC-only features.
c) It’s a bug and nothing more
Ubisoft has not commented yet on this particular issue, but we’ll be sure to update our story once the French company does issue an official statement.
Kudos to YouTube’s NX Gamer and Rebel Leader for discovering this!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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I love all those peasant patches deteriorating the graphics ^^
Atleast it’s not just us that get upset if there’s a downgrade, now we’ll have irate Console gamers also screaming with us
That’s the way I felt about Unity. Finally everyone sees it, not just us!
OH dear,was not PS4 made by gods?why does this miraculous device need downgrade?is it called optimization in the world of shitboxes ?
Ubisoft, what are you playing at?
ubi …
😀
Far Cry 3 looks the same if not better but runs much much better than Far Cry 4. How can this be possible. Assassin’s Creed Unity was murdered by people for being buggy but I feel Far Cry 4 is a worse PC port and should have received more negative reaction.
I’m inclined to agree. Far cry 4 runs like horse ma**re for me, but far cry 3 is perfect.
Far Cry 4 has better textures, that’s for sure. Aside from that (and poor coding), Ubisoft has gotten REALLY bad at PC graphical settings. The settings don’t make any sense. It was the same thing with Watch_Dogs – you simply can’t tell what the game is doing when you switch options.
Some options are missing altogether, like grass distance – grass goes off into the horizon and there’s no way to limit it for a little extra performance. There’s an option for Vegetation, but I can’t tell the difference between Low and Ultra.
LOD is linked to the texture setting. Ultra textures are just High textures with more distant LOD rendering. WHY?! Why can’t I have high resolution textures up close but low res textures in the distance? Why does switching to Medium textures remove Normal and Specular maps on all objects? WHY?!
There’s also no option to turn off texture parallax. If you notice the buildings there’s some extreme parallax effect on the stones. Maybe that’s linked to the texture setting? I can’t turn that off for increased performance because how often will I be staring at a wall?
This is what happens when you don’t consider the PC until you finish the game – effects are linked together with no way to tweak them – they get lumped together in illogical ways that make zero sense on a PC.
You got to remember that Unity is vastly more varied than FC4. You only need 3GB VRAM for ultra high textures with FXAA, but you’ll need 4GB VRAM using MSAA and 1080P+ with Unity. FC4 is just repeated terrain and not much texture variation at all. AC Unity doesn’t have texture problems if you have 3-4GB of VRAM.
I’ve been at peak VRAM on my R9 280 3GB and it’s been fine, nowhere near as bad as Watch Dogs or bad stuttering like FC4.
I’m not even thinking of buying AC Unity at this point. I still need to beat FC4, then save up for GTAV. I’ll probably get AC: U this time next year. Unless it’s Origin-only, in which case it’ll be two years.
I don’t blame you.
Lol save the cash for GTA V, atm I haven’t even thought about buying FC4 or AC U and am perfectly coping, it’s not like I need to play it, Ill wait till maybe next year or a few years
ACU won’t get fixed.
Its because Ubisoft purposely links these settings so that we don’t have the option of fine tuning for our system specs so the average person thinks, “Well i guess its time for that newest $500 GPU”. And then they still get stuttering in the end because Ubisoft doesn’t give a damn since they are already working on the next pile of horse crap!
What I’m really dying to see is an option, whereby player can choose the distance, when he sees textures in their full resolution, so players can adjust this distance based on available VRAM. This would help to solve the recent problems with high VRAM requirements on PC.
So far no one made it. They just allow us to choose to reduce quality of ALL textures, not just of those, that are far away from character.
And judging from your post it seems like we’re not going that way. Ubisoft (Kiev) even messed up standard texture settings, among other things.
Right. Texture Quality setting seems to be linked to LOD, texture resolution, and I just noticed that it’s also linked to Anisotropic Filtering. So retarded.
Hmm it doesn’t stutter on mine, but textures are set to HIGH on my 2GB GTX960. Everything else maxed out, and running upsampled to 2560×1440 with nVidia’s DSR. The stuttering comes from setting textures to ultra with less than 6GB VRAM. Textures are swapped in and out of VRAM, which causes stuttering and visible texture streaming glitches. ULTRA = 6GB VRAM, VERY HIGH = 4GB, HIGH = 2GB, etc.. You might have two Titans in SLI, it doesn’t change a thing if each card only has 4GB.
Yes but the textures are looking messed up because of the lack of VRAM. It’s PC users fault as well, you can’t keep to 2GB and expect very high resolution textures with loads of variation in an open world game. You can steam textures better to not have stuttering but distance textures still will look bad like even with Crysis 1, if you turn texture steaming off then you don’t get the issue, but that’s assuming you have the VRAM.
People moaned about the problem in Crysis 1, it used texture steaming only like now, except they’re just steaming way more data now.
“you can’t keep to 2GB and expect very high resolution textures”
FC4 wont use more than 2GB vram, and it stutters on 4GB+ cards too and to be honest, textures are washed up and ugly in most areas.
It will if you’ve got more VRAM, I seen it at 2.6GB VRAM on mine, stuttering is probably asset streaming.
yet still it’s not the problem, doesn’t matter if it uses 1GB or 10GB vram, it’s not PC users fault when the game runs the same on all sorts of cards and stutters on all of them. game is broken & half of it’s options are broken
I want an option whereby player can choose streaming distance, depending on available VRAM. The distance where textures turn from high res to low res or mipmap. The bigger this distance the more VRAM you need. If you don’t have VRAM at all you could potentially lower this settings so high-res textures will be only around character’s feet, which means you could probably play a game even on 512Mb VRAM or lower.
It’s probably even possible to create several levels of reduced quality, when textures first go to 1/2, 1/4 and 1/8 of original quality, depending on the distance.
Disagree. FC4 is an improvement in graphics
and in more stuttering, hooray!
or
d)It’s Ubisoft;
or
d) God rays were removed to improve overall performance in PS4 version.
Or its AMDs fault.
I blame Obama.
Ubi don’t know what performance means, after all frames per second it’s just a number.
Yeah, 16 or 60fps, who cares? It’s just a number… LMAO
Ubisoft reason to downgrade PS4 version.. 😀
WTF is wrong with Ubi.
We’ll only find out when they reach whatever they’re trying dig to
Comments can’t be blank.
Good one!
…
lol 😀
Actually they can be blank. Just delete everything, hit the space button and click save.
Lol as long as they don’t remove it for PC..
Why would they? The only reason to remove it on consoles it to get more fps.
I don’t mind that, it’s how the effect washes everything out that makes me turn it off. It’s like having cataracts, I’d imagine.
It never had the enhanced god rays to begin with. The god rays in the PS4 version and shown in that video are the same as when you run the PC version with god rays set to volumetric and not the higher Nvidia setting.
True, the console version didn’t even have volumetric god rays and fog like the PC version, never mind the NVIDIA godrays.
I’m really not sure why they even have godrays in the first place. It’s horribly implemented and buggy on all settings. It never should have shipped with the game.
Performance wise Godrays runs much slower on AMD Radeons (similar to hairworks which is not even out yet), that might be good reason to remove it from consoles that uses same HW.
Where is the SLI and rebound key fix?
I heard PS4 never had God Rays like the one used in the PC version to begin with,,, and now even those are removed .
wasn’t that enhanced god ray one of nvidia features for PC ?
“God Rays” on PS4 aren’t the same as the ones in PC version.
of course they aren’t but john wrote Enhanced GR which is a PC feature, consoles don’t use it
Looks like they now removed even the simple godrays from the PS4 version, XB1 didn’t even have that. Ubisoft lied about the console version being same as ultra pre-set of the PC version. It’s the same for ACU, PC high pre-set has higher settings than the console, since high pre-set has 2xMSAA.
Consoles are basically custom pre-sets.
so in ubi’s mind:
Very High < High
High = Ultra
:))
Ubisoft=High on something,
It seems like we all kinda forgot about this. Let’s all take a moment and remember where our anger should be directed:
http://www.dsogaming.com/news/assassins-creed-unity-far-cry-4-pc-versions-to-be-developed-by-ubisoft-kiev/
parity John they removed it because of parity
LOL!!
Btw, the god rays are back, for anyone wondering (they are as of the 1.04).
This is not Ubisofts fault. This is due to it is part of Nvidia Gameworks. They didn’t have the authorization for using it. Nvidia is also blocking, and forcing AMDs cards to behave slow with this features. Ubisoft didn’t have the right to use it, as it was not part of him. In fact, he did WRONG to use it, which it was something illegal.