If your first reaction was “what happened to the lighting”, then hooray, because that was my first reaction too. I do seem to have one more screenshot than I was expecting, but I think that was “Very High with HBAO+ and Enhanced Godrays”, and that shouldn’t be below unless I’m stupid. How nice does it look? Well, here’s a slew of screenshots. I could probably fiddle with it further to find a better balance, but honestly I don’t care very much. I eventually settled on Very High, with HBAO+ and Enhanced Godrays turned on as neither of these seemed to impact performance at all, as far as I noticed. Ultra was still playable, mostly hanging around at about 35 FPS but with some steeper and more regular drops, while pushing things up to Nvidia settings knocked things down to about 20. Moving the settings up higher did cause a bit of a drop, though.
Once I reached Banapur (the first village of the game) I didn’t have this problem anymore and could tweak things however I wanted, but it was a bit odd anyway. Or maybe they’re locked for some reason.Īs an aside, I actually wanted to play the opening with custom graphical settings, but this seemed to trigger a bug in which protagonist Ajay Ghale was suddenly suffering from cataracts. Maybe I’m wrong and these are so intensive they’re dragging things down to 30 but no lower. Interestingly, the in-game cutscenes where you’re talking to someone at length (a mission briefing, say) do seem to be capped at 30 FPS, despite being in-engine and seamlessly integrated into the gameplay.
There were a few drops (which – at a guess – was when it was loading in another chunk of the map, because this tended to only happen when nothing was really going on, but I’d been travelling for a little while) but nothing really worth complaining about, or even remotely surprising. I ran through the opening tutorial section of the game on High, and the framerate was pretty constant between 40 and 55 – which I consider to be perfectly playable. Long-time readers should know by now that I’m a big fan of any game that allows me to weaponise bees. It might be terrible on every other system setup out there – I have no idea! But it’s fine for me. If you’re here hoping I’m going to say it’s an Assassin’s Creed Unity-esque catastrophe, then I’m afraid you’re going to be a bit disappointed, because Far Cry 4 runs really rather well on my hardware. Amusingly, the Graphics Quality toggle – which automatically sets things up for you – offers an “Nvidia” setting, which is actually above Ultra. Most come in Low, Medium, High, and Ultra settings, although there are a few Very High options scattered about in there too. It’s pretty scalable, with a whole page-and-a-half of options that you can tweak to your liking. Godrays, for instance, now has “Off”, “Volumetric Fog”, and “Enhanced”, and I’m assuming the latter is basically the same as the previous option of “NVIDIA GODRAYS.” Not a huge amount has changed, although there’s now an FOV slider and some of the names for the settings have changed. I’m not going to go too in-depth into the menu options because Peter did that back when the Ahoy Mateys version of the game leaked onto the internet last week. That’s what I like to see in my PC options menus.