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Far Cry 4 PC performance thread

Mohonky

Member
That's micro-stuttering, not the stuttering that happens when you move between places.

To fix micro-stuttering you can try to cap fps exactly at 30 (just to see if it's fixed). The micro-stuttering may depend on the fact the game internally has a clock that goes 30 fps, and so it handles poorly if you are above 30.

For example, if I cap framerate at 35, I get a lot of stuttering. Yet if I cap it at 30 the stuttering goes completely away.

I know that at 30 fps goes away. It's possible that also at 60 it goes away. Set your monitor at 60hz. Cap framerate at 60. If you go above 60 stuttering will show, but if you are at fixed 60 it should go away.

In my case setting the monitor at 60hz and capping framerate at 30 the stuttering is completely gone, whether or not I enable vsynch.

I tried using nvidia control and set vsync to half refresh rate and the game was a constantly stuttering mess.

If I run it vsync, game runs mostly 50+ and some dips into the 40s with some stutter. But its better than locking it to 30 as the game is nothing but stutter at that point.
 

Gaogaogao

Member
you know how theres this grappling/ mountain climbing mechanic that puts you face to face with a low resolution texture? they should make a better texture for that.
 

Dries

Member
They obviously don't care enough to put forth the effort to fix it since we will all buy it. Complaints are in one ear and out the other for them since they already have our money. :(

My question would be, why does Ubisoft see obvious issues like this and never attempt to remedy it? Do all the thousands of developers they staff play the games without saying a word about it? Stuttering drives me fucking insane, how could it not bother them?

This. THIS!! It was a known problem in FC3, and they just......... don't fix it in FC4? It really blows my mind.
 

rBose

Banned
I agree, I am sick of tinkering with .ini and .cfg files to fix the game myself.

I don't think I paid for this.
 

jett

D-Member
How is the shooting in this game? Is it the same as FC3? Everything about the gunplay in that game felt off to me.
 

LilJoka

Member
This. THIS!! It was a known problem in FC3, and they just......... don't fix it in FC4? It really blows my mind.

I played the whole of FC3 but never experienced the stutter like FC4. FC4 stutter feels just like Watchdogs but worse.
 

Barnzini

Neo Member
Tonight was the first time i've had a chance to give it a proper go since i downloaded via Uplay and my 670 struggles a bit running mostly high/no AA at 1440p. It's in the 30-40fps range most of the time.

I tweaked the mouse settings and created a shortcut to ditch the load screens and after a couple of hours the game wouldn't let me manually save? The Save and Quit option wouldn't work either because it mentioned something like " cannot save while auto updating is in progress" So yeah kind of annoying i have to lose hours of gametime.

When i rebooted the game without using the shortcut the save options show up so i'm thinking i've borked something with the tweaks i made....ahhh
 
I've played about 4 hours now.

I have to say this is the most graphically demanding game i've tried on my PC. I only finished building it about 4 months ago and im getting around 30-40fps.

4770k OC to 4.4
780Ti OCd
16gb 2400 DD3
Samy Evo SSD
Asus Rog Swift G-Sync Monitor (1440p).

I used the chart supplied earlier in this thread to cherry pick my options. According to that chart its mostly Ultra and "Nvidia" level options for my 780Ti.

Thank fuck for G-Sync as the frame rate dips and jumps from 25 - 50 depending on what im doing.

My questions:
Are there any graphical options that are really resource hungry but really don't add much?

I have the tripple buffering option to off (As it is by default). I put it on once but it seemed to drop me down to 25fps. Is anyone using this instead of other options?

I think i'm going to turn off the TXAA all together for the frame boost. 2xTXAA is set to off gets me 50+fps. Would SMAA be better than nothing? Whats the hit on FPS for that?
 

JaseC

gave away the keys to the kingdom.
GMG is Uplay. Upon further reading it seems certain regions are locked, I think someone from the US can gift it to AUS but not sure?

Yes. You want to avoid buying a copy from someone in Eastern Europe, South America, South-east Asia or Turkey. At some point Valve's going to have to either broaden the local currency support in SA or separate Brazil as it did with Turkey as the entire region being under the AllowCrossRegionTradingAndGifting flag because of one country is ridiculous.
 

wiggleb0t

Banned
Played around 6 hours worth and runs fine capped to 63fps in RTSS everyrthing max 2txaa 60fps though stutters hitches to 45-50fps every 100metres driving.

SLI with drivers 344.48 using FarCry Blood Dragon SLI compatability bits in nvidia inspector 90% +- scaling.
Weird thing was shadow flickering occurred after rebooting game and changing graphics settins 5-10times without exiting game fixed it. Messed with AA and shadow options until it stopped. Really strange but fixed issue :)
 

Damian.

Banned
Played around 6 hours worth and runs fine capped to 63fps in RTSS everyrthing max 2txaa 60fps though stutters hitches to 45-50fps every 100metres driving.

SLI with drivers 344.48 using FarCry Blood Dragon SLI compatability bits in nvidia inspector 90% +- scaling.
Weird thing was shadow flickering occurred after rebooting game and changing graphics settins 5-10times without exiting game fixed it. Messed with AA and shadow options until it stopped. Really strange but fixed issue :)

Are you saying you don't get any stutters capping to 63 but get hitches down to 45-50 capping to 60, or you get the 45-50 hitches even capped at 63? I've gotten the game to a point where there is no stutter at all, but has loading hitches down to 57-58 every so often while moving around. Reminds me of the disaster the 680 was upon launch. :(
 

Alo81

Low Poly Gynecologist
Ah another Far Cry, another hideous implementation of vsync.

0drBTfs.png


Yuck!

Much better!

holy christ that's awful.
 

noomi

Member
So 1.4 is coming tomorrow yay!

Anyone know of any comparison between regular fur and nvidia hairworks?
 

Damian.

Banned
What was the reason for delaying 1.4 besides the USB black screen thing? That can't be the only reason as that happens with 1.3 too.
 

fanboi

Banned
Why are you asking us?
Anyway, the game can be configured to avoid stuttering. There are plenty of posts in the thread to start you off.

... it was just a general statement...

And I have tried several solutions, while some improves, nothing has solved it 100%.
 

Mad1723

Member
So far, I had awful frame pacing and stuttering with the game. I ran some of the tweaks, but the borderless fullscreen tweak made the most difference, if that can help someone in need.
 

garath

Member
So I've got a solid 60fps after tweaking a few things. Started with everything on NVIDIA level and 2x TXAA. Turned environment quality down a notch or two, turned post processing FX down and I did the tweak Andy recommended in the xml to turn off ATOC.

i5 2500k @ 4.2
8gigs DDR3
EVGA 970 FTW
Win 7 64bit

Now only have a couple issues left.

- The mouse. I have to tweak some more but it felt like mouse acceleration was on despite turning it off. I did the tweaks in the OP but didn't seem to help. In fact after doing that, the slider for acceleration was all the way up. So I think maybe there's a right combo to get the mouse right. I'll experiment more.

- FOV. Yes I have a slider lol. But the slider is so imprecise. I looked in the xml and it seems to be translated to some crazy 1.03847267 type number. I google searched a little bit but I'd love to find the exact number to translate it to 85 FOV. Anyone know how the slider and the number translate to actual FOV?
 

wiggleb0t

Banned
Are you saying you don't get any stutters capping to 63 but get hitches down to 45-50 capping to 60, or you get the 45-50 hitches even capped at 63? I've gotten the game to a point where there is no stutter at all, but has loading hitches down to 57-58 every so often while moving around. Reminds me of the disaster the 680 was upon launch. :(

Capped at 63 for no real reason, I'm on 120hz so lol 80-90fps was fine maxed without aa but foliage looks harsh so capped to 60(63)...... Seems to only hitch when driving and there is no bottle neck on cpu usage or gpu usage..... SLI, drivers &/or engine related?
Lower settings still results in 'hitchting/jerky' fps dips driving every 10seconds for 1/4 second, no big deal but hope that can be fixed.

Game unlocks is absurd :| Unlocks to carry weapons.... lol :| I need cheats as hunting animals isn't fun.
 

Damian.

Banned
I've played for about 2 hours now just messing around and am scared to get in a vehicle because I think it will be a repeat of Watch Dogs. Thinking I will have to do the MipMap change...I have seen several comparisons in here, some showing that it is a drastic change to texture quality, and some showing virtually no difference. What's the deal with that?
 

b0bbyJ03

Member
Holy fuck, i finally got to sit down and play for the first time last night and god damn this fucking shit is a mess. I've got a 970 SC and a 3770k and even at low settings this thing would stutter like crazy. I'm soooo sick of this!
 
Its just beyond me how the stuttering made it into this game in release. It was a well known problem at FC3's launch, everyone complained about it. They patched it a few months later. They are using the same engine, how the H did the stuttering make it into FC4?

Completely baffles me. Devs are really not giving a crap about PC ports so far this gen. Pretty depressing.
 

Spacejaws

Member
Godamn I've been having some weird problems line objective NPCs not appearing and such. Just spent 30mins trying to climb the first bell tower before the NPCs spawned at the base then sat around waiting for an attack that never came.

Eventually checked Bullguard logs and found it's beeb blocking some of the download as suspicious web traffic.

Gutdamn bullguard. This is right after it decided to remove x-wing, gun and bully .exe's from my computer without notifying me. What the hell man! (I like Bullguard is my defence to possible upcoming Bullguard sucks replies)
 

riflen

Member
I've played for about 2 hours now just messing around and am scared to get in a vehicle because I think it will be a repeat of Watch Dogs. Thinking I will have to do the MipMap change...I have seen several comparisons in here, some showing that it is a drastic change to texture quality, and some showing virtually no difference. What's the deal with that?

It depends on whether the player camera is very close to a textured object or not when they take their comparison screenshots.
Disabling mipmap 0 means the very highest quality texture, the one displayed when you are extremely close to an object, is not loaded.
Also it's common in any given game that not every object has a very high quality texture map available.
 

Damian.

Banned
Its just beyond me how the stuttering made it into this game in release. It was a well known problem at FC3's launch, everyone complained about it. They patched it a few months later. They are using the same engine, how the H did the stuttering make it into FC4?

Completely baffles me. Devs are really not giving a crap about PC ports so far this gen. Pretty depressing.

The only logical answer is they are punishing everyone for the few people that pirate their PC software.
 

kershner

Banned
Feel I should just remind everyone in here that the devs aren't actually lazy and aren't actually trying to punish you. The simple reality is that on PC there are hundreds and hundreds of different possible hardware configurations, it's literally almost impossible to make sure the game runs 100% on every single one of them (this is part of the appeal of console development).

The only people who are going to post about it are the ones affected, so you're seeing selection bias as far as how 'widespread' these problems are. The vast majority of people are running the game just fine, otherwise the outcry would be a lot more widespread and a lot louder.

For my own part, I was having a little stutter but setting the maxBufferedFrames setting to 1 completely fixed it.

I have an i5 4670k @ 3.4, a single GTX 660 Ti, 8GB RAM, and an SSD. I get a very consistent and smooth 30-40 FPS with just about everything on Ultra with the exception of shadows, which are set to High. I'm playing at 1080p. Fairly impressed with how this game looks and runs on my system.
 
I don't know what changed on my end... but at some point last night, when I booted up the game, the "crushed blacks" bug associated with SLI, just... went away?

*scratches head
 

Damian.

Banned
Feel I should just remind everyone in here that the devs aren't actually lazy and aren't actually trying to punish you. The simple reality is that on PC there are hundreds and hundreds of different possible hardware configurations, it's literally almost impossible to make sure the game runs 100% on every single one of them (this is part of the appeal of console development).

The only people who are going to post about it are the ones affected, so you're seeing selection bias as far as how 'widespread' these problems are. The vast majority of people are running the game just fine, otherwise the outcry would be a lot more widespread and a lot louder.

For my own part, I was having a little stutter but setting the maxBufferedFrames setting to 1 completely fixed it.

I have an i5 4670k @ 3.4, a single GTX 660 Ti, 8GB RAM, and an SSD. I get a very consistent and smooth 30-40 FPS with just about everything on Ultra with the exception of shadows, which are set to High. I'm playing at 1080p. Fairly impressed with how this game looks and runs on my system.

Ubisoft dev trying to damage control...Typical.
 

Damian.

Banned
Not really. Most games run on recommended specs just fine for the majority of users. Ubisoft games are notorious for having stuttering/loading/hitching issues. Ubisoft has made Far Cry synonymous with stuttering.
 

RadioSupreme

Neo Member
I5-4590 3.30Hz
GTX 770 2GB
Z97 Mobo
8GB Ram

So day one I was running 60-55 with rare a drop below 50 running on the nvidia chart recommendations for my card, then day two the game literally just dropped to 30-60 (with it being more on the 30 side most of the time) Anybody else experience this?
 

kershner

Banned
nah, having to tweak PC games to get them to perform at their best... is "typical".

Yes? This is pretty much par for the course for PC gaming going back decades. It's the reality of running software not specifically designed to run on your unique hardware configuration. Sometimes you luck out and the game runs perfect, more often than not you'll need to tweak something.
 

Damian.

Banned
Funny how the vast majority of people playing Ubi games fail to "luck out" and the games have problems. Lots of tweaking isn't common with PC games anymore unless your system has unresolved issues, or you are trying to run a Ubisoft game. Apologists only make Ubisoft take it that there isn't a real underlying problem when it's obvious that there is.

In the future, don't encourage lazy development please.
 

d00d3n

Member
I believe GPU Max Buffered Frames should be 3 in almost all cases. You shouldn't use a lower value unless the game you're playing is extremely trivial for your machine to run. Even then, it doesn't make much sense to set.
Setting it lower than 3 can cause pausing or hitching as it prevents the GPU from working if the CPU is busy. You're forcing the GPU to deliver frames just in time to be displayed and it can cause low GPU usage in some CPU limited situations. The maximum value is 5.

I believe this setting has no effect when you enable SLI mode. SLI AFR mode requires the buffering of frames to be effective and the setting is probably controlled by the game in AFR mode.

Thanks, this is interesting.
 

kershner

Banned
Funny how the vast majority of people playing Ubi games fail to "luck out" and the games have problems. Lots of tweaking isn't common with PC games anymore unless your system has unresolved issues, or you are trying to run a Ubisoft game. Apologists only make Ubisoft take it that there isn't a real underlying problem when it's obvious that there is.

In the future, don't encourage lazy development please.

Can you point to a source where you're seeing the 'vast majority' of people playing Far Cry 4 are having this problem? I've seen a handful of users in this thread, maybe a couple hundred+ scattered throughout Reddit. Am I missing something? If this was something as botched and widespread as say, Unity, you'd be seeing headlines about it everywhere.

It's unfortunate, but you seem to be in the small camp of users having a sub-optimal experience with FC4. Give them some time to work it out before calling them 'lazy.'


EDIT: Also, what's your hardware config? Are you running SLI?
 

Damian.

Banned
Most people that play don't care about these kinds of issues or don't know any better to complain.

2600k@4.5
16GB RAM
GTX 970

Games I've played recently with absolutely no issues or extremely minimal:

Alien Isolation
Borderlands TPS
Call of Duty Advanced Warfare
Gauntlet
Saints Row IV
State of Decay
Batman Arkham Origins
Assassin's Creed Unity
Civilization Beyond Earth
Tomb Raider
Dragon Age Inquisition
Battlefield 4

Games I've had notable problems with mostly stuttering, CPU usage issues, etc.

Far Cry 3 (DX11 Mode)
Far Cry 4
Assassin's Creed IV
Watch Dogs

There seems to be a pattern here.
 
Funny how the vast majority of people playing Ubi games fail to "luck out" and the games have problems. Lots of tweaking isn't common with PC games anymore unless your system has unresolved issues, or you are trying to run a Ubisoft game. Apologists only make Ubisoft take it that there isn't a real underlying problem when it's obvious that there is.

In the future, don't encourage lazy development please.

I'm looking at my Steam library right now, which dates back to HL2, and I'm scratching my head trying to remember a game I didn't have to tweak... I guess all those games, must have been made by Ubisoft, or wait... all of the gaming computers i've build have had "unresolved issues".

In the future... buy a console please.

When I disable my second GPU, this game runs exceedingly well on my rig. SLI compatibility issues near launch are par for the coarse.
 

Skyzard

Banned
I've played about 4 hours now.

I have to say this is the most graphically demanding game i've tried on my PC. I only finished building it about 4 months ago and im getting around 30-40fps.

4770k OC to 4.4
780Ti OCd
16gb 2400 DD3
Samy Evo SSD
Asus Rog Swift G-Sync Monitor (1440p).

I used the chart supplied earlier in this thread to cherry pick my options. According to that chart its mostly Ultra and "Nvidia" level options for my 780Ti.

Thank fuck for G-Sync as the frame rate dips and jumps from 25 - 50 depending on what im doing.

My questions:
Are there any graphical options that are really resource hungry but really don't add much?

I have the tripple buffering option to off (As it is by default). I put it on once but it seemed to drop me down to 25fps. Is anyone using this instead of other options?

I think i'm going to turn off the TXAA all together for the frame boost. 2xTXAA is set to off gets me 50+fps. Would SMAA be better than nothing? Whats the hit on FPS for that?

I have very similar specs and I'm playing at 2560x1440 as well.
Locked to 31 with RTSS.

AA - SMAA
Tree relief - Off
Motion blur (since it's 30fps) - Off

Everything else ultra.

I also disabled mipmapping in the config file. DisableLoadingMip0 = set it to 1
 

Damian.

Banned
I'm looking at my Steam library right now, which dates back to HL2, and I'm scratching my head trying to remember a game I didn't have to tweak... I guess all those games, must have been made by Ubisoft, or wait... all of the gaming computers i've build have had "unresolved issues".

In the future... buy a console please.

When I disable my second GPU, this game runs exceedingly well on my rig. SLI compatibility issues near launch are par for the coarse.

Edited my post. If you have a lot of games that need tweaking then you need to evaluate your PC as something is wrong. It's rare that I have to go the extra mile anymore to get a game to run good...Unless it's a Ubisoft game, then there is an almost certainty that I will have to spend a lot of time tweaking.
 

kershner

Banned
Edited my post. If you have a lot of games that need tweaking then you need to evaluate your PC as something is wrong. It's rare that I have to go the extra mile anymore to get a game to run good...Unless it's a Ubisoft game, then there is an almost certainty that I will have to spend a lot of time tweaking.

I disagree. The need to tweak some games outside of the options provided in the in-game menus is again just a reality of running software on your very specific set of hardware components. The likelihood that they were able to QA on a machine with your exact
hardware specifications, down to the third-party manufacturer of your GPU for instance, is extremely low. Bugs will slip through no matter how extensively you can test your product.

This is not to say that all devs should get a free pass - some games are certainly tested more rigorously than others, but FC4 seems to be overall a well optimized and fantastic looking game. Here's to hoping your issues get resolved in a forthcoming patch.
 

garath

Member
Damn UBI and their no FOV slider = pirate thing. I've been scouring the web trying to find out how to get a FOV of 85 with their slider and/or cryptic FOVScaleFactor number in the XML but the first 3 pages of google hits regarding ANYTHING about FOV and Farcry 4 is "NO FOV SLIDER = PIRAATTEE HARRR". Sigh.

Fortunately I found one buried in there. Someone else might find this useful.

http://forums.ubi.com/showthread.php/954042-FOV-slider-numbers-(picture)

1 = 75
1.23 = 90
1.5 = 110

The default appears to be around 60? I bumped my slider up but apparently not enough. I'm sitting under the 75 threshhold. No wonder it looked funny to me.
 

Damian.

Banned
I disagree. The need to tweak some games outside of the options provided in the in-game menus is again just a reality of running software on your very specific set of hardware components. The likelihood that they were able to QA on a machine with your exact
hardware specifications, down to the third-party manufacturer of your GPU for instance, is extremely low. Bugs will slip through no matter how extensively you can test your product.

This is not to say that all devs should get a free pass - some games are certainly tested more rigorously than others, but FC4 seems to be overall a well optimized and fantastic looking game. Here's to hoping your issues get resolved in a forthcoming patch.

A Sandy Bridge setup with a recent Nvidia GPU is pretty common in the mid-high end, you're telling me that they can't be bothered with testing that configuration out? Noted.

Funny how other developers with much smaller budgets and QA teams can release games with little to no bugs on most common setups and with Ubisoft it's typical to release an unfinished game that runs poorly on most common setups.
 

Damian.

Banned
That's the truth of it. A well maintained PC shouldn't have problems with most releases. Ubisoft have obvious problems for most users.
 

kershner

Banned
A Sandy Bridge setup with a recent Nvidia GPU is pretty common in the mid-high end, you're telling me that they can't be bothered with testing that configuration out? Noted.

Funny how other developers with much smaller budgets and QA teams can release games with little to no bugs on most common setups and with Ubisoft it's typical to release an unfinished game that runs poorly on most common setups.

What's your GPU manufacturer? What about your ram? What about your HDD? SSD? What is your CPU clock set to? Your GPU's clock? What kind of software do you have running?

These are just a few of the thousands of variables at play when determining a point of failure for one of these bugs. It's not as simple as 'Intel CPU + Nvidia GPU, whats the deal?'

Also it's hardly fair to compare a 'smaller-scale' dev with Ubi and FC4. FC4 is simply a massive game with tons going on that is pushing hardware all over the place. I really think you need to step outside your own situation for a moment and realize that most people are running and playing the game just fine, and as unfortunate as your experience is - it's just what happens sometimes with PC gaming. There will more than likely be a patch to completely fix your issues down the road.
 

Elsolar

Member
Feel I should just remind everyone in here that the devs aren't actually lazy and aren't actually trying to punish you. The simple reality is that on PC there are hundreds and hundreds of different possible hardware configurations, it's literally almost impossible to make sure the game runs 100% on every single one of them (this is part of the appeal of console development).

The only people who are going to post about it are the ones affected, so you're seeing selection bias as far as how 'widespread' these problems are. The vast majority of people are running the game just fine, otherwise the outcry would be a lot more widespread and a lot louder.

For my own part, I was having a little stutter but setting the maxBufferedFrames setting to 1 completely fixed it.

I have an i5 4670k @ 3.4, a single GTX 660 Ti, 8GB RAM, and an SSD. I get a very consistent and smooth 30-40 FPS with just about everything on Ultra with the exception of shadows, which are set to High. I'm playing at 1080p. Fairly impressed with how this game looks and runs on my system.

You have an overkill CPU though. A lot of the stuttering and hitching issues stem from the fact that the game seems to completely max out one CPU core and leave the others at ~20-40% utilization. On my i5-3770k (@3.4) and GTX 970 I get 45 - 60 FPS depending on location. Lowering quality settings does nothing to help, since 9 times out of 10 the slowdown happens with my GPU utilization at 80-90% and one out of 4 CPU cores at 100% utilization. It reeks of poor optimization.
 

Damian.

Banned
What's your GPU manufacturer? What about your ram? What about your HDD? SSD? What is your CPU clock set to? Your GPU's clock? What kind of software do you have running?

These are just a few of the thousands of variables at play when determining a point of failure for one of these bugs. It's not as simple as 'Intel CPU + Nvidia GPU, whats the deal?'

Also it's hardly fair to compare a 'smaller-scale' dev with Ubi and FC4. FC4 is simply a massive game with tons going on that is pushing hardware all over the place. I really think you need to step outside your own situation for a moment and realize that most people are running and playing the game just fine, and as unfortunate as your experience is - it's just what happens sometimes with PC gaming. There will more than likely be a patch to completely fix your issues down the road.

It's what happens with Ubisoft PC development. They spread themselves out too far and the development process is convoluted causing many issues across a broad range of system configurations.

In recent years it's not typical of PC gaming to ship a game with severe playability issues since most devs can release games with minimal issues across a wide variety of configurations. Ubisoft simply doesn't care enough to QA their games and expect most players to deal with the problems until months after release when they may or may not have the issues resolved. Typical trash development.


You have an overkill CPU though. A lot of the stuttering and hitching issues stem from the fact that the game seems to completely max out one CPU core and leave the others at ~20-40% utilization. On my i5-3770k (@3.4) and GTX 970 I get 45 - 60 FPS depending on location. Lowering quality settings does nothing to help, since 9 times out of 10 the slowdown happens with my GPU utilization at 80-90% and one out of 4 CPU cores at 100% utilization. It reeks of poor optimization.

I am finding this as well to be an issue. I fixed the maxing out of Core 3 by setting Threaded Optimization to 'On' in the NVCP and forcing the game to run only on Cores 0,2,4,6. This helps spread the load more evenly and stops that particular issue.

The only real issue I have now is a very apparent loading stutter, just like Watch Dogs, and since Watch Dogs was never fixed, it's doubtful it will be fixed here either unless the community is able to step up and fix what Ubisoft refuses to fix.
 
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