Not a lot of PC games get to live to have as many installments as Far Cry and now in its 6th numbered release, Far Cry has really come a long way. Far Cry really took off with Far Cry 3 and Vaas Montenegro built a great legacy for Far Cry to stand on. Ubisoft managed to really capture that essence with Far Cry 4 to continue that legacy with Pagan Min and then experiment in Far Cry 5. I personally do feel Far Cry 5 was a bit further from what I expected but regardless it was an enjoyable experience and today we come to the latest installment in the Far Cry franchise: Far Cry 6.
Far Cry 6 is a first-person RPG that puts you in the shoes of Dani Rojas, a military-trained citizen of Yara forced into conscription to fight against the oppressive dictator of Yara, Anton Castillo. Together with a band of guerillas of Libertad, their leader Clara and the guerilla master Juan Cortez, along with memorable critters Guapo and Chorizo, Far Cry 6 is heavily gearing towards its character ensemble while still planning to be the debut title for Far Cry on new-gen platform, demonstraying the raytacing capabilities of the aging Dunia engine on new platforms.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Yara!
We have a Playstation 4 review that will cover the story and overall aspects of the game but I will personally touch on some details in this review when I can. Still, we’ll focus on the PC performance and check-out out the game scales on today’s modern graphics cards.
We’d like to thank Ubisoft for providing the code for this game as well as NVIDIA, ZOTAC, GALAX and PALIT for their GPUs used for this test.
Screenshots
All screenshots are taken in 4K Ultra HD at maximum settings with raytracing enabled and no FSR. Screenshots are from an early part of the game to avoid further spoilers.
Graphics Details and Settings
The game’s graphics settings allows us the change a few things. We are given 4 tabs containing Monitor, Quality, Color and Advanced Settings. Most of the settings we need to change that affect graphics is under Monitor, Quality and Advanced Settings.
The first tab is the Monitor tab which allows to change the primary display adapter in-use, the refresh rate of the monitor, our window settings (Fullscreen, Windowed, Borderless) and of resolution. There are also options to change the display in use if you’re running multiple monitors as well as the aspect ratio.
Quality settings is where the detail settings of the game can be changed. There are graphics presets in Far Cry 6 starting from Low to Ultra, each one affecting the various graphical detail. One can also customize the detail settings to their liking.
Raytracing can also be enabled and disabled under the Quality tab and is only available as an On or Off option.
The color tab is very basic with details for brightness, contrast and gamma. Personally, this could’ve under the monitor tab.
Under advanced is Vsync, Adaptive Resolution, Resolution Scale, and FidelityFX Super Resolution or FSR. For those unfamiliar, Adaptive Resolution let’s the game control the resolution of the to best fit the current system while resolution scale is a multiplier of your actual scale e.g. .5 of 1920×1080 is 1280×720 but will leave your display still at 1920×1080 but the game engine will render at 720. Very useful to tweaking it to your liking but that can be done best with FidelityFX Super Resolution or FSR. AMD’s dynamic upscaling technique uses various techniques to accelerated upscaling in the game, allowing you to reserve some budget for taxing rendering like with raytracing enabled.
Performance Testing
Test Setup
Processor: Intel Core i9-10900K
Motherboard: ROG Maximus XII Extreme
Memory: G.Skill TridentZ Royale DDR4-4000 CL14 16GBx2 (32GB)
Storage: Patriot Viper VP4300 2TB
PSU:Â Seasonic Platinum 1050w
Cooling: Corsair H150i 360mm AIO
Monitor: ROG PG27UQ
VGA: Various cards
Note: The 5700XT is just FSR enabled, no RT.
Note: This 5700XT sample that I have has put up insanely high numbers in AMD titles and it was first used with the launch of Monster Hunter Iceborne where it also trounced the 2080 Ti. I’ll update these charts once I finish the game and retest the failed runs at the bottom.
FSR and Raytracing Comparison
Far Cry 6 features DXR and FSR support. DXR is the base form of raytracing in DirectX 12 while FSR is AMD’s own upscaling technology. As Far Cry 6 is not an NVIDIA technology partnered game, it does not have DLSS or Reflex.
Below is a comparison of Far Cry 6’s base performance versus with raytracing and FSR on with RT on.
Conclusion
We have a Playstation 4 review of Far Cry 6 as well that you may read here.
After 3 years we finally get Far Cry 6, the much awaited installment in the Far Cry franchise. While Far Cry 5 itself wasn’t bad, it detracted from the formula which made Far Cry 3 and Far Cry 4 very memorable: a central villain of sorts that wrenches out every bit of hatred a player can have on a single character. Far Cry 6 returns to that formula with none other than Giancarlo Esposito of Breaking Bad fame as the primary villain of Far Cry 6 and this is partly what drove this game to the hype that it has right now.
Ubisoft was really smart in tweaking the details they needed to share during the early promotion and that is wisely integrated into the game. First, we have the characters with Juan Cortez and Clara acting as central figures and providing a larger context to the world in contrast to Anton Castillo and his tyrannical monologues.
Gameplay-wise, if you’ve never played a Far Cry game or any western RPGs before, the game is quite straight forward: go to objective location and do stuff. Whether that requires you to kill someone, blow something or steal something, there’s always going to be one thing that you’ll be doing: walking. A lot of walking. When you start Far Cry 6, you will probably be spending the next 2-3 hours walking, stealing cars and horses along the way until you progress up to a certain point. But regardless, the formula will be the same.
The game does pepper this in moderation and once you advance the story enough, you’ll have the entirety of Yara to explore which is one of the biggest changes of Far Cry 6 from any of the earlier games. The game takes you from the lush beach side areas to lush forests and then puts you to the drab city areas. Its quite varied and the vertical city areas plays a nice variation to the fortresses in Far Cry 5 or the mountainside camps in Far Cry 4. Far Cry 3 players may feel some sense of familiarity in the locations and while not similar in any way, the tropical jungle vibes will instill that sense of nostalgia in some ways.
The game introduces some key mechanics as well including armor pieces that you can put together. These armors piece gear together and add unique stat bonuses or traits to your character. The game also has a rich assortment of weapons, many of which you can adapt and improve thru the workbench which will require parts. There’s also special weapon types that you’ll see but I won’t spoil those for you. Pets are a nice addition but ultimately, you’ll rarely use them especially if you’re going full stealth.
There are some nice little mini-games in Far Cry 6 as well that may want to discover first-hand.
Overall, the gameplay is solid but the ultimate payoff will always be the story and I have not finished the game yet so I can’t say yet if this will hold up versus Far Cry 3 and Far Cry 4 which forever is ingrained to anyone who’s finished those games.
The game is solid and is a nice return to form for the series. There is nothing really new nor revolutionary about Far Cry 6 and it doesn’t have anything gameplay-wise that you’d call advanced. Is it worth the price? As a person that do pay money for books and movies, I like a good story and only if Far Cry 6 can really give me that gripping story can I really say how much worth it really is. As of right now, despite my admiration of Giancarlo Esposito’s Anton Castillo, he has not done enough to really rile me up to detest this villain. As it stands, the game is a current 8/10. Safe and average in overall gameplay.
PC Graphics and Performance Analysis
This is game is built on a raytracing-enabled version of the Dunia Engine and is exclusively a DirectX 12 title. I did have my fears before that with this engine still in duty, that this game could just be Far Cry 5 with raytracing and in most cases, it actually is.
Far Cry 6’s world does see graphics improvement thanks to its more complex details and graphics, there’s also an HD Texture Pack for additional download which bumps up the game’s install size to nearly 80GB. Still, some details did improves like character face models and the actual models. Some other assets you normally won’t notice also got improvement like the animals, heck checkout the mane on the horses. But still, some elements like Jani’s bracelet looks like they cam from the Playstation 2 era, some beads not even completely circular. And this is with an RTX 3090 on 4K.
The game does well with the vegetation and anything pretty much outdoors. The water, the animals, everything looks great but when anything with concrete or is indoors just looks very poorly done. The concrete walls, to the furniture in some areas look like they assumed that players won’t stay there for very long and has decided to really just crap on those things but we’re talking very inadequate levels of bad quality here, especially in a game that replicates to a pixel its main villain’s actors facial detail.
Let’s talk more about the tech: first raytracing. The images above are show us 1 raytraced image and 1 that is not. To be honest, you will have a hard time spotting it. It is quite obvious this game wasn’t made with raytracing in mind. The partnership with AMD could’ve just been a way to squeeze out some marketing budget from Microsoft and Sony for their next-gen consoles but ultimately, raytracing doesn’t do anything for this game. Its beautiful as it is and with nearly a 25% penalty, I highly encourage just leaving it off.
I’ve had some weird performance glitches with the game though which saw the game crashing during gameplay even on a fresh system install on a different PC altogether. The game also sees performance dips in random areas and the stutters on some cards is just hard to explain. I’m guessing not all reviewers would’ve experienced this but it was prevalent in my test system so it could just be a setting or software I am running alongside the game. Still, there will be some graphical glitches I can confirm is present in most of the game especially in the pets which turns them will see them blank out for some reason. Its nothing serious, but quite distracting.
The game is quite heavy and would need at least a GTX 1080 or so for older-gen gamers to play the game in Ultra. I personally don’t see the merits of going ultra and the high preset is what the game will almost always recommend when installing it fresh. The game is very VRAM reliant and games that cannot meet its VRAM requirement will have very heavy performance penalties. CPU load is minor I would follow the system requirements for the minimum safe specs.
