Far Cry 3 VGA Graphics Benchmark performance test

Visual Image Quality

As Jason Brody, players will slash, sneak and shoot their way across the island in a world that has lost all sense of morality you'll notice that the visual quality of the game is pretty darn good, but very heavy on the GPU alright.

System requirements will vary greatly depending the graphics settings, but a modest PC will be required to run the game at medium settings or better.

Far Cry is built on the Dunia game engine, similar to the prequals but it certainly has been updated and is DirectX 11 compatible. Here are the full Far Cry 3 system requirements for PC gamers:

Minimum Specs

• CPU: Intel Core2 Duo E6700/AMD Athlon64 X2 6000+ or equivalent dual-core
• Video: Nvidia GTX8800/AMD Radeon HD2900 or equivalent 512MB DirectX 9c card
• Memory: 4GB

Recommended Specs

• CPU: Intel Core i3-530/AMD Phenom II X2 565 or equivalent quad-core
• Video: Nvidia GTX480/AMD Radeon HD5770 or equivalent 1024MB DirectX 11 card
• Memory: 4GB

Hi-Performance Specs

• Video: Nvidia GTX680/AMD Radeon HD7970 or equivalent shiny new DirectX 11 card
• CPU: Intel Core i7-2600K/AMD Bulldozer FX4150 or equivalent quad-core
• Memory: 8GB

So on the following two pages I want to show you a couple of in-game screenshots and basically focus on actual in-game quality settings that we use and which  you can change. We always peek as well in-between AMD and NVIDIA's quality differences e.g. in-between AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards. Honestly, image quality these days for both companies are near equal. You can zoom in and blow up the still screenshots and detect minor differences if you look with a very professional eye as yes -- both companies do optimize games for better performance. We'll leave that as is as there is much more to see quality wise with the in-game modes

Why should you use change or alter internal visual quality modes ? Well for one simple reason, performance .. if you have a lower grade graphics card and would like to plat in Full HD then changes are pretty slim your graphics card would be fast enough. Throttling down towards a lower image quality mode can significantly boost your performance, at the cost of visual quality though. But it creates a good balance in-between what your graphics card can render and what you find acceptable for your average in frames per second.

The game basically has four quality modes: LOW, MEDIUM, HIGH and ULTRA. Next to that you'll have settings and preferences you can choose from. The game however is VERY taxing on the GPU at times game at even HIGH quality settings. In our chart example above  we use a GeForce GTX 680 including a four performance quality modes to demonstrate that.

Based on overall analysis our default test mode will have high quality settings for textures, shadows and terrain. Pretty much a modern DX10/DX11 class card can run the game at 1920x1080/1200 as you are about to find out as long as you keep it in DX11 HIGH quality mode with 2xMSAA enabled. At that point with a GTX 680you'd average out at roughly 55 FPS whilst retaining great image quality. 

If you lack performance however triggering down in image quality modes does offer heaps of extra performance, at the cost of quality of course.

So for our reference baseline results we test with our image quality settings set at 2xMSAA  enabled with the image quality settings at Very HIGH, which is a really nice quality setting.

Guru3D.com » Articles » Far Cry 3 VGA Graphics Benchmark performance test » Page 2