Far Cry Primal PC Performance Review

Conclusion

In many ways Far Cry Primal can be described as a step backwards for the Far Cry series, but terms of both PC performance and stability this game is a great improvement for Ubisoft, with the game lacking the many problems that plagues the launch of Far Cry 4 back in 2014. 

Visually speaking the game looks fantastic, offering some of the most detailed landscapes and foliage that we have ever seen in gaming while at the same time being able to play the game at at higher than 60FPS fairly easily at both 1080p and 1440p resolutions with appropriate hardware. 

The graphical setting of the game leave us PC gamers with a lot to tinker with and the in-game benchmarking tool gives is a great place to test each settings impact on performance, which is great for those who want to quickly judge their gaming performance while messing with the games many settings and give us a great place to accurately and reliably compare the performance of several different GPUs. To be clear we did do some initial benchmarks in gameplay, outside of the benchmark, but we found these results to be very similar to that of the in-game benchmarking tool itself. 

At the low end our similarly priced GTX 960 and R9 380 GPUs usually perform fairly similarly, but in Far Cry Primal the R9 380 has the clear advantage, with the AMD GPU often having higher minimum framerates than the GTX 960 had average framerates, making AMD the clear choice if purchasing a new GPU for this title.

Moving onto the high end GTX 980Ti and R9 Fury X things get much more complex, with out reference GPUs having their own advantages and disadvantages depending on the resolution.  At 1080p the GTX 980Ti held the advantage, but at 4K that advantage swiftly moved to AMD, with both GPUs being nigh indistinguishable at 1440p in terms of performance. 

At 4K the game is simply too demanding to play at a steady 60FPS framerate, but the game is very playable at this resolution at the lowest presets, which still looks great given even with the lower graphical settings. If you want to play the game at higher settings at this resolution or at a higher framerate you will either need to wait for a future flagship GPU or use a Multi-GPU configuration, though sadly we do not have the hardware to test that at the minute. 

having played the game at both the lowest and the highest settings I can say that the game looks great even at low, but the lowest presets do suffer from a little pop in and draw distance issues.  

Far Cry Primal is a great looking PC game, that does not have any real issues on PC at launch for those of us using Single GPU configurations. If you enjoy all the side activities of previous Far Cry games and felt that previous Far Cry games needed more melee combat and interaction with animals then Far Cry primal is certainly worth a look.

 

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