Far Cry 4 Game Performance Review

Results: 1440p, 4K And CPU

Ultra Details @ 1440p

We continue climbing the resolution ladder, and our next benchmark is run at 2560x1440:

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All three high-end graphics cards maintain a minimum of 30 FPS at this resolution, although the Radeon R9 290X exhibits substantially more frame time variance.

Ultra Details @ 2160p

Let's move on to our highest-resolution test at 3840x2160, more commonly referred to as 4K:

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We gave our 8GB Radeon R9 290X sample a shot, though it doesn't look like the extra GDDR5 memory makes much of a difference. We also tried dual-GPU solutions, but were surprised to find that Nvidia's SLI technology doesn't seem to work with cards from different manufacturers, limiting us to single-GPU tests. The extra graphics processor didn't seem to help the Radeon R9 295X2 either, suggesting this game and the drivers supporting it aren't yet optimized.

As for results, the Radeon R9 290X and GeForce GTX 980 fall just below the 30 FPS minimum frame rate threshold. I consider them playable, but not especially smooth. Unfortunately, AMD's Radeon R9 295X2 suffers almost three times the frame time variance of a single Radeon R9 290X.

CPU Benchmarks

In our final benchmark, we consider CPU performance using the GeForce GTX 980 at 1920x1080 with ultra details enabled to see how the top detail level affects a variety of processors.

It's interesting that the Dunia 2 engine powering Far Cry 4 happily takes advantage of multiple execution cores (especially when it comes to AMD's FX series). But it's just as significant that the game enables a greater-than-30 FPS minimum on low-end CPUs like the FX-4170 and Core i3-3220.

While your processor choice does have an effect on game performance, it doesn't look like the bottleneck is significant compared to your graphics card.

The Core i5 and Core i7 demonstrate a near-identical result, probably indicating that Far Cry 4 is graphics card-bottlenecked with these processors.