Far Cry 5 PC graphics performance benchmark review

Just looking for something to trash AMD over?

If the framerates are achieved without a loss of visual quality, then what does it really matter how the framerates are achieved?

Perhaps they're too used to losing performance with Gameworks that getting a free improvement must be bad ?

Typical stupidity of a Fanboy is the failure to recognize the validity of a legit question asked by an enthusiast, which by no means is an attempt to trash their beloved manufacturer.

If you can't see the difference during normal game play, without having to search for the differences or take screenshots to compare, why worry about the difference? I thought the point of videos games was to play and enjoy the game, not stare at the scenery....

You do know the Crysis 2 tesselation thing was proven to be a false narrative? The mesh is there but if it’s not on the screen it’s not rendered.

Source: PC Games Hardware
21.03.2018 at 17:45 Coming up next week is Far Cry 5, Ubisoft's newest open-world adventure. At GDC 2018 in San Francisco, the developers introduced a completely new water engine that they developed for the game. And finally, you also know what effects on FP16 calculations fall back and thus AMD graphics card especially.

Water plays a big role in every far cry. The first action adventure developed by Crytek took us to a wet tropical island. Also in the successors it went again and again into the water, which was constantly improved by the programmers.

But for Far Cry 5 , the developers wanted to dig deeper into the bag of tricks. "Montana, the scene of our game, has plenty of rivers and rapids - which we would not have been able to do so elegantly with our old shaders," says Branislav Grujic, 3D Team Lead Programmer at Ubisoft Toronto. "Add to that more than 50 waterfalls that we used to make by hand, which would have taken enormous time, and sulfur mines that would not have been possible with the old routines."


23 Christian Cutocheras and Branislav Grujic Source: PC Games Hardware The world of Far Cry 5 is divided into sectors of which there are 64 times 64, ie 4,096 pieces. One of many lakes consumes about 20 to 30 of them. And because there are so many waters in the state of Montana, that would have been a lot of hard work by hand.

The developers therefore resorted to procedural irrigation: For example, boundary points are noted on the terrain for a river, then automatically filled with water using the flow tool. Procedural waterfalls rush into the depths of foam thanks to Foam Mapping, while a helicopter over a sulfur pit releases particles from it and whirls them up into the air.


The render path, which is responsible for the realistic representation of the water, uses some tricks. Clever occlusion calculations and the subdivision into near and far rendering do not require the calculation of every drop of water in the highest level of detail. In the previously hand-drawn normal maps of the waves on the water surface set the team in Far Cry 5 on their automatic generation by noise function, which is based on the Brownian molecular motion.

On rocks and coastal areas often form foam crowns, which are automatically created again with noise features. Here, the developers resorted to a trick: The Foam Maps of the entire game world are "baked" in the game world, because their individual calculation would have deducted too much computing power from other processes and not least the actual game. Flow maps are also created automatically, but calculated dynamically. They are based on spline and flood-fill routines, which are displayed in greater detail near the player than at a greater distance.


Bug cleaning water smoothing, lighting and refraction also require a lot of computing power. Christian Cutocheras, Member of Technical Staff, AMD, who helped Ubisoft designers with advice and support, explains a trick the programmers used: "To optimize the shaders, we're reducing the computational accuracy to 16-bit Half Precision." However, that was not allowed to happen automatically: developers and the QA team had to scour the entire game world for areas in which the reduced accuracy did not strike the players.

Remember, Radeon RX Vega graphics cards are particularly interesting for half-precision FP16 calculations, as Vega 10 can run them at twice the speed ("Rapid Packed Math"). Polaris can also run FP16 natively, but not with double FP32 throughput, thus saving only resources.

For further puzzle tasks created differently deep, colliding waters, whose occasional edges were made somewhat blurred by Compute Shader, to ensure a smoother transition. And then there was the fishing line, which can be seen both in the front and in the back of the picture and happily danced up and down the tail ...


The goal of the developers was to complete the water calculations in two milliseconds per frame. At 1.919 milliseconds, they reached their destination, and by using Async Compute, they were able to reduce that time by 0.582 to 1.337 milliseconds. However, the "most expensive" operations, the tessellation and the joining of the overall picture, could not be impressed.

Impressive, however, that the water system is only one part of the big picture - in the finished game, for example, there are particles and the actions of players and NPCs, who in turn put their stamp on the environment.

You found that you're rx580 is epic bottleneck in FC5. The cpu is waiting for the slow gpu :p

It's above 60 fps the whole time, so there's hardly any problem.

When latest console is doing just fine at 4k but your $600 card starts to get into the territory of integrated graphics frame rates, you know something is fucked up.