Far Cry 6 tech review: it looks good and runs well

The venerable Dunia engine returns at the time once more for the sixth mainline entry in the Considerably Cry franchise – and there is certainly a specific sense of a sequence returning to its roots. To start with, the newest open up globe evokes the more lush, jungle terrain of before online games, though you will find also the return of systems like hearth propagation – its omission a great deal lamented in Far Cry 5. Whilst gameplay hasn’t progressed significantly, there are a vary of new graphics capabilities, along with ray tracing on Laptop and a emphasis on 60 frames for every second on the most up-to-date generation of consoles – but also the feeling that the activity requires further more polish to make it anything it can be.

Most likely this is the Dunia Engine’s very last stand, but there is certainly no doubt that Considerably Cry 6 is however a handsome game and some of the new additions to the engine are putting. For case in point, the skies are noticeably more extraordinary than prior games many thanks to the inclusion of a ray-marched volumetric cloud rendering procedure. Comparable systems have been seen in Horizon Zero Dawn and Microsoft Flight Simulator to name just two, but the clouds do search very good in Considerably Cry 6, especially in how they interact with lighting, primarily all through sunset. There are limits even though, with their low resolution breaking down into noise with fast motion at 60fps.

Significantly less remarkable but continue to amazing is h2o deformation, most effective highlighted when marine wildlife interacts with the floor – but just one element of the sport I was genuinely hunting forward to was the introduction of components-accelerated ray tracing functions. However, this is Computer-only, but irrespective, there are two critical results below: shadows and reflections. How a lot they insert to the presentation is dependent on the influence. Honestly, ray traced shadows are a bit of a concern mark in their effectiveness, for the reason that 1st of all they only apply to solar shadows – so all indoor and synthetic shadows are conventional shadow maps. Also, shadows forged by vegetation or alpha-masked transparencies are also just shadows maps mixed into the RT equivalents. Yet another detrimental factor is the reality that RT shadows – alongside with much of the article-procedure pipelines – run at quarter resolution. RT shadows are a net achieve overall, but the implementation could be a lot improved and the effect is as well confined overall.

Ray traced reflections fare improved, featuring a very good up grade above regular display-space reflections, boosting the realism of surfaces – particularly on the retro vehicles in the recreation. Immersion is additional, primarily as the participant product is noticeable in these reflections. Nonetheless, once again, the feeling is that the implementation is not as sturdy as it could be. Reflections do not use to water surfaces like the ocean, streams and ponds, which however use SSR. RT reflections also will not apply to clear surfaces like glass, major to visible discontinuities (the cars’ bodywork attribute RT reflections, the windscreens do not). And again, we are hunting at quarter resolution effects, main to the ‘big pixel’ result and a lot of aliasing because of it. Other gripes contain partial simplification of the earth in reflections and paring back again of substance fidelity.

Ray traced consequences have a basic on/off toggle when the base line is that the video game is crying out for larger excellent modes to long term-evidence the game, or only to give the person extra preference. That mentioned, quarter resolution effects are not limited to RT only. Particle outcomes, display-space shadows, movement blur and depth of discipline all operate at appears to be like quarter resolution – which offers more troubles the even more down the resolution chain you go (Collection S can look rough for the reason that of this) – and there are no high-quality configurations on Computer system to relieve this trouble. When blended with the blurriness of temporal anti-aliasing, the difficulty is even more magnified.

So how does the sport fare on consoles? Collection S appears to devote most of its time in the 1080p-1224p range and whilst you get 60 frames for each next, the presentation is not hugely eye-catching. The basic blurriness in the presentation indicates that hammering down pixel counts for PS5 and Series X is tough but PlayStation 5 renders in the 1728p to 1872p selection, when the Microsoft flagship has a bigger resolution window, seemingly in the 1872p to full 2160p range. The serious-daily life implication of this is only that you get a crisper graphic on the superior-conclude Xbox console.

Past resolution, good quality options on visible options is a extremely shut match among the two consoles and it appears to me like Ubisoft has made intelligent trades in reducing precision in certain outcomes whilst nevertheless offering what seems like a substantial-conclusion Laptop expertise. Volumetrics, texture filtering, water and shadow quality are equivalent to Laptop on superior options, while geometry quality would seem to sit in between PC’s medium and high choices. Although incredibly refined, PS5’s geometry excellent degree does appear to be to be really somewhat greater than Series X’s.

So when it arrives to Pc optimised settings, I propose working with the console-equivalent configurations and producing a couple of even more changes. I might opt for the substantial environmental detail environment which lowers the vary of synthetic lights in the sport environment, as effectively as utilizing the employing the substantial terrain environment which minimally decreases the length of better detail terrain deformation. What did surprise me is that the street high-quality environment from Considerably Cry 5 has absent, that means that street texture filtering element degrees are quite very low and not even GPU command panel tweaks can return a bigger amount of high quality. Yet another situation with optimised settings for Computer is that dynamic resolution scaling is not performing as it must – and this is a crucial technology for achieving a clean body-charge. I go into this in a lot more depth in the video clip, wherever often it seems to assistance in enhancing body-rates, but in other scenarios it can actually lessen efficiency.

Although consoles do mostly run at 60 frames for each second, there are some problems in this article also. 1st of all, there is certainly digital camera stutter on the console versions of the sport which means that when overall performance is consistent, controller movement does not glimpse smooth when panning. This is not a issue on Computer system. Further than that, all consoles do run at 60fps for the most part – except in hugely dynamic scenes exactly where the camera swiftly pivots or something graphically high-priced hits the monitor suddenly, but this isn’t a significant deal commonly. However, traversal stutter has usually been an situation on Personal computer – unquestionably from Much Cry 4 onwards – and it really is nevertheless right here, and now extends to the console versions far too, accompanied by intrusive screen-tearing. It can be an concern on Laptop far too, solved only by turning down options to the minimal and throwing a great deal of electric power at the problem – which is not perfect.

I identified another challenge with the Personal computer model and it will involve VRAM utilisation when utilizing the optional High definition texture pack. In accordance to launch products, 11GB of online video memory is demanded for these textures at 4K although working with ray tracing, which proved to be no issue at all for the 16GB Radeon RX 6800 XT. Of course, the competing RTX 3080 has concerns as it is a 10GB card – but it can be not as straightforward as it sounds. VRAM utilisation right here never exceeds 8.6GB, indicating that the total 10GB of memory is not made use of. In other scenarios, I identified that the RTX 3080 would only allocate 7.9GB of memory and the High definition textures hardly ever loaded. This doesn’t appear correct to me.

My ultimate gripe concerns the in-game cutscenes, which seemingly operate at 30fps whilst the relaxation of the match runs at 60fps. It is not perfect but it really is not the initially sport to do this and it will not be the very last. Having said that, what helps make it even much more jarring is that particles and other outcomes could however run with unlocked updates, while animation body-pacing can also show jittering artefacts. The game’s presentation suffers as a final result.

In summary, Far Cry 6 is a excellent-on the lookout game and I like numerous of the visible upgrades, but I am considerably less content about other areas of the activity. The Dunia traversal stutter is present on all platforms I analyzed, and though I enjoy to see RT results included to new online games, I am unhappy at the unusually restricted implementations and the locked very low resolutions Ubisoft has deployed right here. On top rated of that, I can understand why write-up-approach effects could be jogging at a reduce resolution – but I might have preferred to have found possibilities to restore them to total resolution on Personal computer, and probably to include all of this moreover RT to a 30fps console good quality method. There’s a great deal to like in Far Cry 6 and perhaps the emphasis in this tech review has been on the parts that slide quick, but in the long run it’s difficult to avoid the feeling that a several more levels of polish could have had designed a massive big difference to this launch.