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Far Cry 3 Performance, Benchmarked
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1. Far Cryin' For The Third Time

The Far Cry franchise enjoys a distinguished place in the history of PC gaming. At the beginning of 2004, while we were busy drooling over how awesome John Carmack's upcoming Doom 3 looked in its promotional screenshots, upstart game developer Crytek shipped its own first-person shooter several months ahead of id's offering and wowed jaded enthusiasts accustomed to dark, enclosed environments. Although Doom 3 went on to become a huge commercial success, I personally think that Far Cry was the better game by far. It defined what a open-world sandbox shooter could be. There's no right or wrong way to play the game; we could use stealth or run-and-gun as we saw fit.

Beautiful scenery.Beautiful scenery.

Crytek was not involved in Far Cry 2, and the franchise was (man)handled by Ubisoft's Montreal development team. It was a sequel in name, but didn't have anything to do with its predecessor, aside from the fact that they both featured palm trees. The game received generally positive reviews, but several of the Tom's Hardware editors remember Far Cry 2 as being forgettable. I don't think any of us bothered to finish that one.

Ship ahoy, cap'n!Ship ahoy, cap'n!

As a result, my expectations of Far Cry 3 were deliberately held in check, as I half-expected a lame cash-in on the franchise. Happily, I was wrong; Ubisoft managed to create something very special. It has the original Far Cry's lush island setting and open-world freedom combined with The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion's exploration and loot mechanics, Battlefield's outpost capturing, Just Cause 2's vehicle variety and flavor, and a handful of unique innovations, including a crafting system that doesn't make me want to gouge my eyes out and a tattoo-based skill mechanic.

Outpost secured, raise the flag.Outpost secured, raise the flag.

A huge interactive intro does an impeccable job of establishing the character and encouraging you to identify with his plight. I won't spoil any of the details, but I will issue a warning: this is one of those games that you should avoid if you don't have much self-control. That's how addictive it is. Allow it to, and it'll eat up the hours you should probably be spending with your family...

Reminds me of Half Life 2.Reminds me of Half Life 2.

...and that's only the single-player campaign. I avoided the competitive and co-op modes because our goal here is to measure PC hardware performance; that's really difficult in the variable world of multi-player gaming. So, let's have a look at the game's graphics and detail settings.

Bad guys are red. Vehicular homicide is appropriate.Bad guys are red. Vehicular homicide is appropriate.

2. Image Quality And Settings

Far Cry 3 is powered by the Dunia 2 engine, a heavily modified version of Crytek's CryEngine. The game looks fantastic, and, more than anything, else it reminds me of the original Crysis (a testament to how ahead of its time that game was back in 2007). Some of Far Cry 3's visual elements may be superior to the original Crysis, though it appears that the environment isn't quite as detailed (this is subjective; I haven't played the original Crysis in a long time). No matter what, though, Far Cry 3 looks amazing. My one nitpick is that some of the animal animations seem to halt abruptly and unnaturally as they transition.

Far Cry 3 employs an advanced light culling system that brings down the overhead of shading many lights, some of which don't necessarily affect an entire scene. The title also optimizes multisample anti-aliasing by only applying the feature to "important" parts of the image, purportedly without sacrificing image quality. DirectCompute-accelerated HDAO and Direct3D 11 TSAA also serve to improve the title's better-looking graphics.

The game has five detail presets, but individual settings can be customized as you see fit. What follows are the options you see when you specify Low, Medium, High, Very High, and Ultra on the Overall Quality menu.

The changes between each detail level are often subtle. However, there are gradual improvements in shadow, geometry, and lighting quality as you go from one end of the spectrum to the other.

One thing you can't see in these screenshots is the LOD transition that happens as you approach objects. The developer chose a pixellated fade between levels of detail, rather than a softer transparency fade (perhaps to help performance?), and it's painfully obvious at times. The following screenshot captures the effect as it happens.

The pixellated LOD transition is obvious.The pixellated LOD transition is obvious.

The good news is that this artifact is less apparent at higher detail settings because the transition happens further away from the camera. If you're using the Medium or Low preset, though, you're going to have to live with it.

3. Test System And Graphics Hardware

As always, we strive to represent game performance across a wide range of graphics hardware. We're including cards from the low-end Radeon HD 6450 and GeForce GT 210 to multi-card Radeon HD 7870 CrossFire and GeForce GTX 660 SLI setups. This title does support triple-screen setups, so we also have benchmark results at 5760x1080 to present.

Each graphics card is set to its reference specifications to best represent a majority of the boards on the market.

Because there aren't any repeatable sequences in the dynamically-generated game world, we're benchmarking by running the same path through outposts and the jungle for 50 seconds. Results are consistent, within 1 FPS of each repeated test.

Test System
CPU
Intel Core i7-3960X (Sandy Bridge-E), 3.3 GHz @ 4.25 GHz , Six Cores, LGA 2011, 15 MB Shared L3 Cache, Hyper-Threading enabled.
Motherboard
ASRock X79 Extreme9 (LGA 2011) Chipset: Intel X79 Express
Networking
On-Board Gigabit LAN controller
Memory
Corsair Vengeance LP PC3-16000, 4 x 4 GB, 1600 MT/s, CL 8-8-8-24-2T
Graphics
GeForce 210 1 GB DDR3
GeForce GT 630 512 MB GDDR5
GeForce GTX 650 2 GB GDDR5
GeForce GTX 650 Ti 1 GB GDDR5
GeForce GTX 660 2 GB GDDR5
GeForce GTX 660 Ti 2 GB GDDR5
GeForce GTX 670 2 GB GDDR5

Radeon HD 6450 512 MB GDDR5
Radeon HD 6670 512 MB DDR3
Radeon HD 7750 1 GB GDDR5
Radeon HD 7770 1 GB GDDR5
Radeon HD 7850 1 GB GDDR5
Radeon HD 7870 2 GB GDDR5
Radeon HD 7950 Boost 3 GB GDDR5
Radeon HD 7970 3 GB GDDR5
Hard Drive
Samsung 470-series 256 GB (SSD)
Power
ePower EP-1200E10-T2 1200 W
ATX12V, EPS12V
Software and Drivers
Operating System
Microsoft Windows 8
DirectX
DirectX 11.1
Graphics Drivers
Catalyst 12.11 beta 11, Nvidia 310.70 beta
Benchmarks
Far Cry 3
v.1.02, running through jungle from outpost, 50-second Fraps run
4. Low-Detail Benchmarks

Far Cry 3 is a graphically-demanding game, and entry-level GPUs simply aren't fast enough to achieve playable performance.

Using the game's Low detail preset at 1280x720, the Radeon HD 6450 and GeForce 210 DDR3 are completely insufficient.

With that said, the GeForce GT 630 GDDR5 (otherwise known as the GeForce GTX 440 GDDR5) and Radeon HD 6670 DDR3 do well enough at this entry-level combination of low detail and resolution. But what about at 1920x1080?

As we might have expected, the Radeon 6670 DDR3 and GeForce GT 630 GDDR5 are unable to maintain suitable performance. Consider the GeForce GTX 650 and Radeon HD 7750 bare minimums for playing Far Cry 3 at 1920x1080.

5. Medium-Detail Benchmarks

In the following tests, we're using the Medium detail preset, in addition to 2x anti-aliasing.

The Radeon HD 7770 delivers at least 30 FPS at 1680x1050, while the GeForce GTX 650 is a bit faster than that.

Running at a resolution of 1920x1080, AMD's Radeon HD 7770 drops under 30 FPS. You'd probably want to turn off anti-aliasing or drop the detail settings a bit to help improve performance.

In better news, the GeForce GTX 650, 660 and Radeon HD 7850 and 7870 have no problem maintaining smoother frame rates.

6. High-Detail Benchmarks

Our high-quality benchmarks are tested using Far Cry 3's Ultra quality preset, with the addition of 4x MSAA.

AMD's Radeon HD 7870 generally hovers under 30 FPS, below our rough target for playability. Meanwhile, the GeForce GTX 660 Ti and Radeon HD 7950 with Boost are only a little bit quicker. Even the powerful Radeon HD 7970 and GeForce GTX 670 are humbled by average frame rates just above 35 FPS. Only the two Radeon HD 7870s in CrossFire and GeForce GTX 660 cards in SLI manage to generate averages in excess of 45 FPS.

Speaking of multi-card solutions, notice that the Radeons achieve higher average results, but suffer lower minimum frame rates. In the frame rate-over-time chart, you can see that the GeForce boards in SLI yield smoother numbers than AMD's cards, which are not as consistent.

None of these cards are able to handle 5760x1080 using Far Cry 3's most demanding settings.

Although the Radeon HD 7970 and GeForce GTX 670 manage playable results at lower detail presets, I don't think we'll see a GPU able to handle this title at its Ultra detail settings using three screens until the next generation of hardware shows up.

We should also mention that we experienced some texture anomalies on the GeForce cards at this detail level. None of the results are playable, so the issue isn't particularly significant. But we did see something similar when Battlefield 3 debuted, requiring a driver revision from Nvidia to fix.

7. CPU Benchmarks

Finally, we want to have a look at the impact of processor performance on Far Cry 3's frame rates. Let's use a Radeon HD 7970 to help alleviate as much of the graphics bottleneck as possible.

The good news for folks with Piledriver-based processors is that the FX-8350 is nearly as quick as Intel's Core i3-2100 (never mind the fact that the Core i3 costs $90 less).

The Bulldozer-based FX-4170's minimum frame rate is quite a bit lower, though it's still plenty playable. Dual-core chips from both AMD and Intel take fairly substantial hits, while the Phenom II X4 955's Stars architecture bottlenecks performance, despite the fact that it sports four physical cores.

We're glad to see so many processors able to maintain fast-enough numbers. However, it's important to keep balance in mind as you pair CPUs and graphics cards. Upgrading a Phenom II X4-based machine with AMD's current flagship graphics card, for example, limits performance compared to a more modern Intel or AMD processor.

8. Far Cry: Third Time Is A Charm

Far Cry 3 isn't the best-looking game we've ever seen on the PC, but it's definitely an attractive title. More importantly, it provides an incredibly fun single-player experience that's every bit as addictive as the Elder Scrolls series, combining open-world sandbox gameplay with impressive terrain, vehicles, weapons, and places to explore.

The natives are sleeved like convicts, but they're quite friendly.The natives are sleeved like convicts, but they're quite friendly.

Enabling modern visuals requires that you own a respectable graphics card, though. Don't even bother trying to play this game with less than a Radeon HD 6670 DDR3 or GeForce GT 630 GDDR5, and even then you're limited to 1280x720 at entry-level detail settings. If you want to step up to the Medium quality preset using 2x MSAA, a Radeon HD 7770 or GeForce GTX 650 Ti gets you moderate performance at 1680x1050. Increase that to 1920x1080, though, and you'll need a Radeon HD 7870 or GeForce GTX 660 to get more than a 40 FPS minimum.

Virtual funeral. I accidentally drove over him. Awkward!Virtual funeral. I accidentally drove over him. Awkward!

Finally, cranking this title up to its highest details with 4x MSAA requires a GeForce GTX 660 Ti or Radeon HD 7950 with Boost. If you'd like a little more headroom for demanding sequences, the GeForce GTX 670 and Radeon HD 7970 are better choices.

As far as 5760x1080 goes, forget about playing at Ultra quality with 4x MSAA. We're not sure that there's a rig out there able to deliver perfectly playable performance without some sort of compromise on detail settings.

Stuck on the beach? The easier to skin you, my dear!Stuck on the beach? The easier to skin you, my dear!

Not that we're disappointed. Even the Medium preset looks good in Far Cry 3. We think you'll be too busy enjoying this immersive title to notice the difference.