Far Cry 5 PC Performance Review

Conclusion  

Far Cry 5 offers players a lot of picturesque scenery and environments that beg to be explored, acting as in ideal playground for some the usual antics that the series is known for, be it in the air, on the ground, atop a boat or around a range of wild animals. 

Despite its use of the DirectX 11 API, Ubisoft has shown that advanced features are still accessible to developers on the ageing API, keeping Far Cry 5 at the forefront of PC technology while being remarkably sparing on resources. Far Cry 5 presented no issues when using our older 2GB GPUs, was able to run at 4K with just over 4GB of VRAM while offering a lot of visual clarity at the game’s higher presets.   

The only fault that we can level at the game is that it would have been nice to see the game with some more scalable graphical settings, though the trade-off here would be that the game would lose the minimal graphical differences that can is visible between the game’s Normal and Ultra settings. In gameplay, the only easy to spot the difference is in the draw distance of foliage. While this could be a sticking point for those that dislike pop-in, the performance difference that we found was a mere 5-8FPS on our ASUS GTX 1060 Strix at 1440p. If you want to see a more significant increase in performance, Far Cry 5’s Resolution Scaling solution is a great way to gain some extra performance, especially if you are already using the game’s Normal Settings.   

We don’t recommend playing Far Cry 5 at settings below the title’s Normal preset, as it offers the best balance between visual quality and performance. We fervently believe that lowering the game’s resolution target is better than losing more of the game’s graphical fidelity. Even so, our older R9 380 and GTX 960 GPUs were able to play the game at Ultra with a steady 30 FPS, which offers a pretty good experience if you are using a gamepad, delivering an experience that is similar in feel to the game’s console version.  

CPU-wise, we found that Far Cry 5 operated well on both AMD Ryzen and Intel Broadwell-E hardware.  Even in our dual-core quad-thread Intel setup was able to play the game at over 60FPS at all times. It appears as if Far Cry 5 suffers from a single-threaded CPU limitation when aiming for much higher than 60FPS, at least when using our CPUs at 4GHz at 1080p Maximum settings. In our eyes, if you meet Ubisoft’s 60FPS CPU system requirements, you shouldn’t have any issues. 

Moving onto the GPU side of things, it is clear that Far Cry 5 prefers Radeon GPU hardware, thanks to Ubisoft’s use of Shader Intrinsics for optimal GPU utilisation and Rapid Packed Math for AMD’s latest Vega GPU offerings. Our GTX 1060 and RX 580 cards offer similar performance throughout, with Radeon taking having a minimal, but constant advantage. However, when it comes to Vega we see a very different story. 

Given Ubisoft’s use of Rapid Packed Math/FP16 compute, AMD’s RX Vega 56 storms ahead of Nvidia’s GT 1070 to do battle with the company’s higher-end GTX 1080, which only managed a small performance lead at all resolutions. This performance boost makes us excited to see Rapid Packed Math in more games, especially given its ability to be used in DirectX 11, DirectX 12 and Vulkan games. We certainly hope to see this feature in other future games and that Nvidia can offer a similar gaming feature in the future. Rapid Packed Math/FP16 compute provides an avenue for graphics hardware and games to become more computationally efficient, which is never a bad thing to aim towards.  

With Far Cry 5, Ubisoft has shown us that they can create beautiful games which can run well on a wide range of hardware, something that lies in stark contrast to Assassin’s Creed: Origins, which is renowned for running poorly on AMD hardware. The stare of Montana has never looked better in a game, providing players with a world which begs to be explored. Even the water physics in the game are satisfying to watch, especially when you are on a relaxing fishing trip. In all, Far Cry 5 offers very little to be disappointed with from a hardware or performance perspective. 

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