Far Cry 6 releases tomorrow and Ubisoft has lifted its review embargo. Powered by the Dunia Engine, it’s time now to benchmark it and see how it performs on the PC platform.
For this PC Performance Analysis, we used an Intel i9 9900K with 16GB of DDR4 at 3600Mhz, AMD’s Radeon RX580, RX Vega 64, RX 6900XT, NVIDIA’s GTX980Ti, RTX 2080Ti and RTX 3080. We also used Windows 10 64-bit, the GeForce 472.12 and the Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition 21.10.1 drivers.
Ubisoft has added numerous graphics settings to tweak. PC gamers can adjust the quality of Shadows, Texture Filtering, Geometry/Vegetation, Environment, Watter, Terrain, Volumetric Fog, and Anti-Aliasing. There are also settings for Motion Blur, Camera Shakes and Poisoned Effects. The game also supports Ray Tracing Reflections and Shadows, AMD FSR, and comes with a Field of View slider.
It’s also worth noting that Far Cry 6 features an HD Texture Pack. However, this pack requires more than 11GB of VRAM at 4K/Ultra/Ray Tracing. Here is what Ubisoft told us about the game’s HD Texture Pack.
We can also confirm that both the RTX2080Ti and the RTX3080 display low-resolution textures on some surfaces with the HD Texture Pack at 4K/Ultra/Ray Tracing. Below you can find a comparison between the HD Texture Pack (left) and the vanilla textures (right). As you can see, there are numerous low-res textures in the left screenshot. These low-res issues are completely resolved when running the game at 1440p on these two GPUs.
As we’ve already said, Far Cry 6 suffers from major CPU single-thread issues. In order to find out how the game scales on multiple CPU threads, we simulated a dual-core, a quad-core and a hexa-core CPU. The game comes with a built-in benchmark tool which is what we’ve used. Do note, though, that this isn’t a stress test and that other more demanding areas can be found in the game. For instance, the first village is more demanding than the benchmark scene. So that’s something that you’ll have to keep in mind.
Now the good news here is that those with modern-day CPUs will be able to play the game, even when using a dual-core PC system. Our simulated dual-core system was able to push a minimum of 58fps and an average of 75fps at 720p/Ultra settings. This game relies heavily on the IPC of its main core/thread that it’s using.
Due to the game’s CPU single-thread issues, Hyper-Threading introduces a performance hit. Our hexa-core and octa-core systems performed better when we disabled Hyper-Threading (by around 10fps, though the minimum framerate was similar).
Far Cry 6 supports both Ray Tracing and AMD FSR. And, to be honest, I’m a bit disappointed by the Ray Tracing effects. Ubisoft has used a really aggressive hybrid system for the game’s reflections. As such, a lot of reflected surfaces use SSR instead of RT. Below you can find a video demonstrating it. Oh, and in case you’re wondering, this is exactly why the tree “disappears” from the benchmark scene (at the end of the run). Furthermore, the RT shadows are very minor, and it can be really hard to even notice them. Below you can also find some comparisons between Ray Tracing (left) and the rasterized version (right).
Thankfully, these Ray Tracing effects are not that demanding. For the most part, we are looking at a 10-20% performance hit on both AMD’s and NVIDIA’s hardware.
Now while the Ray Tracing effects are a bit underwhelming, I was really surprised by the AMD FSR implementation. AMD FSR Ultra Quality produces a crisper image than native resolution. However, there is also additional aliasing when using AMD FSR. So while AMD FSR is not as amazing as DLSS, it certainly is a great alternative in this particular title. Below you can find some comparison screenshots. Native 4K is on the left whereas AMD FSR is on the right.
AMD FSR Ultra Quality brings a 20-30% performance. Thus, it’s a must-have for those that want to enable the game’s Ray Tracing effects.
Far Cry 6 is an AMD-sponsored title and appears to be working incredibly well on AMD’s hardware. At 1080p/Ultra/No RT, the AMD Radeon RX580 is almost able to match the performance of the GTX980Ti. Not only that, but the DX12 driver overhead appears to be smaller on AMD’s hardware. This is most likely why the RX 6900XT is faster than the RTX3080 (which is CPU-limited and performs similarly to the RTX2080Ti).
At 1440p/Ultra, the only GPUs that were able to provide a smooth gaming experience were the RTX2080Ti, RTX3080 and AMD RX 6900XT. As for 4K/Ultra, the only GPUs that could hit a 60fps experience were the RTX3080 and the AMD RX 6900XT. In this game, the RTX3080 is 16-22% faster than the RTX2080Ti. On the other hand, the AMD RX 6900XT is 21-23% faster than the RTX3080.
Owners of weaker GPUs will be able to further improve performance by lowering the game’s graphics settings. At 4K/High our RTX3080 was able to push a minimum of 77fps and an average of 82fps. By dropping our settings to Medium we saw a 13% performance increase. Then, by using Low settings, we gained an additional 10-14% performance boost.
Graphics-wise, Far Cry 6 is a mixed bag and that’s because its visuals are as inconsistent as they can get. At times, the game can look absolutely gorgeous. However, in shadowy places and when there aren’t any “hero” light sources, it can look mediocre. Here are two examples. The left screenshot shows some truly amazing graphics. On the other hand, the right image makes the game feel like a really old game. I’m not exaggerating here; the second screenshot looks like the original Crysis with modded textures. It’s THAT bad (at least for today’s standards as Crysis came out in 2007). The game also has numerous pop-in issues, even on Ultra settings. Not only that, but almost all of the in-game real-time cut-scenes are locked at 30fps.
In conclusion, Far Cry 6 has some major CPU optimization issues. Despite using DX12, the game relies heavily on one CPU core/thread, and this will introduce major bottlenecks on PC systems with older CPUs. The game’s Ray Tracing effects are also underwhelming. Additionally, we did experience some stuttering issues when the game was loading new areas. On the other hand, the AMD FSR implementation is great, and the game can run on a wide range of GPUs (provided you lower some settings). Lastly, and although the game can sometimes look amazing, it can also look awful under different lighting scenarios. To be honest, I don’t remember this visual inconsistency in Far Cry 5 or New Dawn. And yes, the benchmark scene is one of those underwhelming scenes (especially with that ridiculous glowing effect that surrounds most objects and characters).
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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God damn those are some outdated looking graphics, even by Ubisoft standards.
AMD holding back PC gaming due to RDNA2 being awful with RT.
I imagine Ubisoft has already started on the remaster.
And Nvidia is holding back PC gaming with the pathetically low amount of VRAM it provides. The game is struggling to load textures at 4k Ultra RT, even with such a mediocre RT implementation. If they added RT effects like those in Control or Metro Exodus EE or Cyberpunk, you’d only require even more VRAM.
RDNA2 and Ampere are both great (outside of prices), and each has its own strengths and weaknesses.
In 2022 game developers will release first games that won’t support old consoles. Those games will be designed for more than 8 GB of memory, fast CPU and can require SSD for data streaming:
– April 2022: Stalker 2 (GSC)
– Summer 2022: Redfall (Arkane)
– November 2022: Starfield (Bethesda)
– Late 2022: Forza Motorsport 8
By that Time today “current” console’s will be old ……
And all 4 of thos games are Microsoft exclusives. . . . .
How much they pay you ?
Or you a bot ?
Why 10GB VRAM shouldn’t be enough for these gay textures?
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c880fbc5a87049e12a407c6b1aa48c31c0a5e83a61f823ec68b91e06123e54e7.jpg
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/672d6bddcacd15691230af8c110bb5488f99a6b318dbb739d5a973c3883877a1.png
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/bdc37f9b99b83104134df50e32becdf296410bab461e9b2544f4e101ae370bc1.png
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/33ca7ca3c57c486dea5d4920ae8cdb2e699cf0e1d740f272462c54a51ac88143.png
Didn’t they pulled that crap with the latest Ghost Recon games too? Ubisoft is cancer.
UBI had a history of notoriously bad texture streaming – Sure its not the case here?
If more VRAM is needed to make a game look decent, please explain why other games like RDR2 look so much better. If you think all games should be designed for 4K Ultra, then you are mistaken. The game should start by looking decent at 1080p first, then scale up for higher resolutions.
Cant compare a better looking game from a dev who knows what their doing vs a team that have worse gfx and don’t know what their doing 😉
Good point. I def seen better looking games run better. I think a good middle ground like 2k should be the focus so it scales easy up to 4k and down to 1K. I always use DSR anyway on my rtx2080 to get 60fps in 4k and cant really tell the difference. 4K screens are becoming more popular these days.
Wait what? If you need VRAM the 3090 has 24GB of it.
Sadly this is just AMD, the sponsor, trying to make their cards look relevant.
My 3090 disagrees with you, 24gb is quite ok =) That said they are really placing it close to the edge in the rest, many forget the difference between allocated vs really used memory however.
Some dev’s are notoriously lazy and allocate whatever vram they get their hands on, while the good/clever ones let already loaded textures etc remain loaded even when their not currently in use – Just to save an load later (behaves almost like the disk cache in that case… most cried their memory was aten by the OS in those days… even when it releases it when it is really needed for something else)
Raytracing currently sucks anyway, you better learn about true raytracing instead of spreading bullsh*t kid.
While I agree that in a lot of games RT feels unnecessary, but when RT is done right it does make a huge visual difference, especially when used for global illumination (shadows and reflections admittedly not so much). The game Control e.g. looks primitive without RT GI. In the new Metro, GI again makes a very noticeable difference in visual quality.
Ultimately it matters how RT is implemented and by whom. Lazy or incompetent developers, or developers chasing calendar deadlines (Christmas, Easter, new year, etc.), or publishers trying to keep work hours from cutting into their profit margins, would continue to produce mediocre products for quick cash grabs.
Real raytracing is not possible with the current hardware whether the developer is good or not.of course the implementation matters but it is still crappy fake ray tracing.developers put less effort on rasterization and instead,waste time on extremely primitive ray tracing.this is the current trend and will be for a long time.
Again, I agree that DX12’s rendering is not fully raytraced, quite simply because of:
a) the massive performance overhead. A single 1080p frame can take several seconds to render on an RTX gpu, even with the Optix RTE, which is currently the fastest way of rendering through RT outside of a render farm.
b) Most people don’t have RT capable hardware.
c) A product that had hardware necessary to do full RT would either have very low space left for rasterization hardware, or would be ridiculously expensive and power-hungry.
This is hybrid rendering, or partial raytracing, calling it “fake” would be technically inaccurate. There is already a term for fake raytracing, it is called rasterization. That is the whole deal of raterization. That is exactly why it was incorporated – to create a cheap alternative to RT by faking everything (since, as you know, raytracing is much older than rasterization).
Let’s not forget, these are multi-billion dollar corporations (MS, NV, AMD) making multi-billion dollar decisions. If they thought they could maintain their profit margins with rasterization, they would still be gladly doing it for another 30 years. They are doing it only because rasterization really has reached its limits in terms of what can be done with it within economically feasible time and skill constraints.
Yeah, most of the gen-z gamers haven’t realized its hybrid RT and should not be mixed up with real RT
Even the reviews seem to be about 75% on average, so nothing special here. Lucky I didn’t pre-order and waited to see the reviews and the performance analysis. No thanks, I’ll give this a skip and (maybe) pick it up when it goes on sale as it’s definitely not worth the asking price. Sad really, for a “AAA” game.
That’s what I’ve been seen as well.. Reviews that rate it a mid 70s. I don’t call a game mediocre unless it’ rated in the 60s but I definitely don’t see real value in the game at full price. Maybe gamers have finally gotten enough of Far Cry games.
Another dev team that puts puddles of water on slopes.
Man, I love my 3080, but that 10GB frame buffer still stings. Holds up fine at 1440p for now, but I doubt I’ll get 4-5 years of use out of it like I did with my GTX 1080.
Using junksole as a baseline is bad. You cannot say console junk has 16GB of shared memory PC games will never cross 10GB VRAM cap. That’s bs presumption, we do not even know how next 5 years will be in gaming technology, AAA is ultra pozzed but I’m talking about technological advancements that will eventually leave the Junksoles in dust like all Cucksoles since the first.
Nvidia purposefully avoided the higher VRAM, why the fck does a 3070 get 16GB VRAM ? That’s their new refresh plan, also 2060 is getting a new refresh with 12GB VRAM in 2022.
At the present it doesn’t matter but you cannot say the same for future. 6GB VRAM cards are basically trash, 8GB is bare min spec, same for this weird 10GB BS. Soon 16GB and 20GB will become bog standard.
RT takes RAM, resolution takes RAM. So even if you use the consoles as the baseline and pretend PC will never have higher texture packs (which they often do, because devs want to sell remasters on the refresh or next gen now), the video is flawed. If the consoles fail to hit a real 4k, which they usually do, then the game will be designed for the VRAM they can allocate. All these new PS5 and XBX games run at weird resolutions like 1600p you will never run on PC. You are at 1440p or 4k most of the time.
The 3080 is going to be screwed moving forward on many titles. It’s a 4k card that will be out of VRAM if it wants to leverage RT, which makes it’s RT features pointless. That is without PC games leveraging higher textures (which they will) Nvidia didn’t randomly put more ram on the newer refreshes without reason. The only way Nvidia will get around this in the next few years on their titles is to have DLSS to use less VRAM, so that they can leverage some RT. DLSS is not perfect either, just like FSR isn’t perfect. It can be mediocre with movement. See ghosting.
Hardware Unboxed was 100 percent right about textures and VRAM. I would much rather have an AMD 6800 or 6900 than a 3080 10 Gig. It’s a much more flawed card than the GTX 970 was in it’s tier. People made way to big a deal about that.
VGC gave FarCry 6 a 2 out of 5
I’m not too familiar with that site but they gave Metroid Dread a 5 which is cool. One of the only few games I’ve been looking forward to trying out this year. Glad I bought the Special Edition for that. Plus, unlike Far Cry 6 the game is unlikely to be woke since Nintendo has been somewhat outspoken about not wanting politics in their games.
Simple, becoz Metroid Dread is fresh not a rehash like FC6.
Are you sure about those 6900xt results ? The 3080 results are lower than other places that have benchmarked the game and the radeon results are FAR higher than anywhere else. In fact, ever since you got that 6900XT it always outputs much higher than it should and that we can see in any other site. The 6900XT is 3080 ballpark of performance at 4k. At launch, it was 1.4% faster at 4k than a 3080 averaged over thousands of benchmarks.
It just doesnt make sense to get a 22% performance uplift at 4k like it shows here. 70 to 86 frames, at 4k they should always be either neck and neck or 3080 ahead.
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/far-cry-6-benchmark-test-performance/4.html
Yeap, our results are valid. I’ve done 3-4 runs per GPU. This game favors AMD’s hardware (I mean, look at the RX580 offering performance similar to GTX980Ti. I’ve never seen such a thing in any other game).
Should add a benchmark with the number of trannies in game. More than 0 = do not buy. I’m going to enjoy watching the Triple A industry collapse as Asian games from Japan and Korea get more and more popular due to not being made by mentally ill people. China also blacklisted tr*nny games recently, so good luck with that plan Western studios.
MSI Afterburner always shows VRAM allocation (the VRAM process figure that you can enable is basically VRAM allocation per process).
Now what is happening in Far Cry 6 is that the game fills the VRAM with HD textures and when there is no more VRAM, it simply stops. Contrary to other games in which there are stutters as the game removes/adds textures to the VRAM, Far Cry 6 does nothing like that. This is good news as there aren’t any performance issues/stutters. The bad news here though is that you can get A LOT of low-res textures.
The only reason we know this is because Ubisoft told us. I assume HWU got a review code from AMD and isn’t aware of this specific issue (because if Ubisoft hadn’t told us, we also wouldn’t be aware of it).
Regarding VRAM stats, we have already enabled dedicated VRAM ;). As you can see in our screenshots, for the MSI Afterburner VRAM stats we have “total VRAM, frequency, dedicated VRAM”. Do note though that Dedicated VRAM shows the amount of VRAM a game allocates (that’s the only metric MSI Afterburner has access to. For real/actual VRAM usage, you need access to the code itself).
Yeap, that’s what we are also using 😉
Great analysis. I wholeheartedly agree that the lighting looks really really flat (Ubisoft’s own valhalla looks miles better, I feel like even fc4 can look better) . Disappointed
Imagine paying $60us to play the game at 720p… LOL. Better off saving money for a better pc
Waiting for nude mods news…
So one thread dictates its “poor” performance… one thread that isn’t helped by bogging it down with Denuvo – Great.
The frameplot’s shown from the game have had quite a few stutters so no thx!
I’m a bit disappointed by the Ray Tracing effects. Ubisoft has used a really aggressive hybrid system for the game’s reflections …… the RT shadows are very minor, and it can be really hard to even notice them.
Of course, and that is because…
Far Cry 6 is an AMD-sponsored title
Far Cry 5 and now 6 features lag stuttering in new areas lol
Just wanted to add that at 1440p, my 3080 was definitely not loading in all the HD textures at all. The game looks better with it turned off for me.
Now I’ve sold that card to a miner anyway, but won’t replace it with anything less than 12.
I buy the game after see this articles , i was really happy to be able to use HDtexture pack since i play at 1440p. Too bad that everything written here is not the truth.
What an overrated series
this article is not telling the truth. I and many other pc users play at 1440p and if you activate the texture pack on 3080 the textures become low resolution after 10 minutes. How long have you been playing? Or did you just run the gaming benchmark hahahaha