Far Cry 5 PC Performance Review

Far Cry 5 PC Performance Review

Introduction

Far Cry 5 shows a lot of promise on PC, removing the shackles of the PS3 and Xbox 360 to open the title up to the efficiency and increased scope that only today’s hardware can provide. Alongside this Ubisoft has worked with AMD to make use of Radeon features like Shader Intrinsics and Rapid-Packed Math (Mixed Precision Compute) to deliver higher levels of performance both on PC and console platforms. 

While the game still runs on the ageing DirectX 11 API, it showcases a level of technical prowess which is beyond what we see with most developers as well as Ubisoft’s commitment to maintaining several game engine designs across their mainstream gaming lineup. In Ubisoft AAA lineup we can see Anvil Next, SnowDrop and the Dunia Engine, the last of which powers Far Cry 5, it is rare for a publisher to maintain so many engines, especially in an age where Unreal Engine 4 is ridiculously common.

What Far Cry 5 aims to deliver is a realistic interpretation of Hope County, a fictional county within Montana in the United States. The area offers dense forests, mountainous terrain, towns, outposts and plenty of rivers and lakes. 

Today we will be looking at Far Cry 5’s performance on PC using a wide range of hardware configurations, using AMD/Intel CPUs and Radeon/Nvidia GPUs, giving you the opportunity to see how well the game can run for yourself. We will also talk about some of the underlying technology at work here and give players a few settings recommendations for those that want to squeeze a little more performance out of this title.  

Drivers

Far Cry 5 has been one of the first major releases to launch without a Nvidia “Game Ready” driver on day-1, leaving us in an awkward position where we had already finished our Nvidia testing at the time of Geforce 391.35 release. This late release ultimately delayed our review as we retested our Nvidia GPU lineup, with a Denuvo lockout delaying proceedings further, due to its distaste for hardware changes. 

In our testing, we used AMD’s Radeon Software Adrenalin 18.3.4 driver and Nvidia’s Geforce 391.35 driver on Microsoft’s latest build of Windows 10.Â