Far Cry 3 Performance, Benchmarked

Features
By Don Woligroski
published

The third installment of the Far Cry series is more impressive as a game (to us, at least) than its predecessor. But do you need really powerful hardware to enjoy it? We benchmark 15 different graphics cards and eight different CPUs to find out.

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.

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!

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!

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.

Don Woligroski
184 Comments Comment from the forums
  • sugetsu
    "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)."

    My God... Are the reviewers of this website paid to make AMD look bad? Any person with a minimum hint of common sense can clearly see that there is virtually no difference between FX 8350, the i3, the i5 and i7. This is a big disservice to the community.
    Reply
  • rdc85
    :D

    I thinks it read like this

    "The good news for folks with Piledriver-based processors is that the FX-8350 is nearly as quick as Intel's Core i7-3960X (never mind the fact that the Core i7 costs more than $500..). "

    hehe....

    anyways good review...
    Reply
  • Tom Burnqest
    sugetsu"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)."My God... Are the reviewers of this website paid to make AMD look bad? Any person with a minimum hint of common sense can clearly see that there is virtually no difference between FX 8350, the i3, the i5 and i7. This is a big disservice to the community.LOL truthed ! I bet that 8350 when OCed can even close the tiny gap between it and the Intel processors. Can the i3 OC I don't think so.
    Reply
  • echondo
    Why did the benchmark go from Medium straight to Ultra? Why not High settings? Now I don't know how well my 7870 will do on High at 1080p. It does pretty good at medium, but then gets destroyed with everything else on Ultra/high resolution.

    Why no middle ground? And why no 7970/680 tests in Crossfire/SLI? Why use single flagship cards, but then only use SLI/Crossfire for the medium bunch?

    I'm very glad to see that this game uses Crossfire/SLI effectively, ~50% increase in performance for dual GPU configurations.
    Reply
  • EzioAs
    I've heard that FC3 was a demanding game but I never realized that ultra settings was SUPER demanding. Anyways, heard a lot of good things about this game, maybe I'll give it a try.

    Thanks Don for the great review as always.
    Reply
  • Heironious
    2 x 2GB Galaxy GTX 560's in SLI with everything maxed in game and control panel gives around 35 FPS average. (4 X MSAA only though) Ran the cards to 78 which is fine. Turned it down in the NVIDIA control panel to get steadier frames. Not the best looking game you've seen? I think it looks better than even BF 3.

    Edit: These still screen shots don't do it justice.
    Reply
  • sayantan
    This game can be really demanding on CPU depending upon the environment. In a firefight that involves flame throwers and explosions along with some AIs , you can see the framerates drop from 60 to 40 in no time. Also I would like to mention that game stutters like hell with anything below 60 fps . Even 57 -58 fps is unplayable and gives me headache. So it is essential to tweak the settings such that the fps is above 60 most of the time. The good thing is if you have a decent system you can maintain 60fps without loosing too much visual fiedelity. I can run the game at 0x AA @1080p with all other details maxed out using OCed 7970(1060,1575) and 2500k(4.0Ghz).
    Reply
  • ilysaml
    Too late to publish the article, but it's good and indicative as usual!
    Reply
  • sayantan
    sugetsu"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)."My God... Are the reviewers of this website paid to make AMD look bad? Any person with a minimum hint of common sense can clearly see that there is virtually no difference between FX 8350, the i3, the i5 and i7. This is a big disservice to the community.
    rdc85I thinks it read like this"The good news for folks with Piledriver-based processors is that the FX-8350 is nearly as quick as Intel's Core i7-3960X (never mind the fact that the Core i7 costs more than $500..). "hehe....anyways good review...
    The good thing is the game doesn't scale up with intel CPUs making the 8350 really look good in comparison.

    Reply
  • sharpies
    sugetsu"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)."My God... Are the reviewers of this website paid to make AMD look bad? Any person with a minimum hint of common sense can clearly see that there is virtually no difference between FX 8350, the i3, the i5 and i7. This is a big disservice to the community.

    Dude, the writer is only trying to point out that using a dual core i3 is more meaningful than using the 8core FX8350. AND B.T.W. its common sense than the latest games dont even benefit from so many cores. Stop moaning about whether or not the writer is an Intel fanboy because AMD performed well in the GPU section.
    Reply