Gadgetory

hey everyone this is Steve from gamers Nexus dotnet and I am back with another game benchmark this time we tested Far Cry 4 using our usual suite of video cards on all the settings available including the special Nvidia setting now Far Cry 4 like Assassin's Creed which I benchmarked last week is made by Ubisoft and as such it is made in partnership with Nvidia so Ubisoft has partnered with Nvidia and the two of them work together on integrating special graphics technologies that are either not available to am the users or less optimized for AMD users as a result of this partnership in theory Ubisoft is still testing for AMD cards but will test whether that's true or not in the benchmark going forward here in a second before getting to the charts for performance of all the various video cards I wanted to talk about some of the technologies in Far Cry 4 first of all there's a special Nvidia setting that enables effectively ultra high settings or ultra settings except with soft shadows HB ao+ and with TxAA and what those things are first of all TxAA is a temporal based anti-aliasing solution what that means is that it is time-based it looks at the previous frame that was rendered and it looks at the current frame being rendered it compares the two of them by sampling all the pixels that it wants to sample and then it basically decides okay this is how the frames should look in terms of the anti-aliasing around the borders of all the models and objects and it sort of makes movement of the camera a little bit smoother so you don't get this odd flickering effect on objects like hair or fences or other sort of skinny things like signposts when you move the camera with some types of anti-aliasing and you'll see those pixels flicker and they they look more you can see the square pixels around the edges so the TxAA eliminates a lot of that and that is only available to Nvidia that is one of the technologies in here another one is soft shadows similar to pcs s and Assassin's Creed or percentage close your soft shadows it's basically the edges of the shadows are a little bit softer they're not as hard go figure right from the name and all that means is that the light sort of is more natural in its interact with the border of the shadow when the shadow is bordering the the underlying object that it's shading so that just sort of makes it look more realistic because shadows don't normally end in a hard edge they sort of fade away and that's what that does then we've got the enhanced cadres that's another feature of Far Cry 4 is graphics engine this is available to Andy as well but it works much better and more smoothly on NVIDIA cards the enhanced cadres are basically your usual volumetric particle effects god rays that cast a light from the Sun or another source down through fog low-lying fog in the streets or clouds or trees really anything think of go out you know think of outside that thing out the window over there I'm pointing you can't see it but there's a theta out the window called outside and light goes through things like leaves and given the right conditions you can sometimes see kind of a a dusty glow coming down through the the leaves and that's what's generated in Far Cry 4 with enhanced god rays so that's one of the major technologies now in terms of performance the GTX 980 once again rules the day of the charts the game actually uses about 3.5 gigabytes of video RAM if you present four or more gigabytes to the game so that's a step in the right direction for consuming a lot of video ram unfortunately it only uses about 1.6 to gigabytes of system ram that's probably an artifact of the conversion from consoles where all the memory is shared so you will get use of higher frame buffer capacity video cards like a 4 gigabyte 980 or 4 gigabyte 290x or whatever and that shows in the in the benchmark charts so with ultra we run about 80 FPS with night the 980 using ultra settings at 1080p and then the 780ti is about 75 780 68 and so forth the 290 X is 66 now although that 290 X is a perfectly playable fps at Ultra it is not actually playable and here's why and video cards are optimized really well in this game you can play far cry 4 on a 750 Ti with medium or high or medium high settings and you will be perfectly happy at 40 FPS it will look fluid even with when you're used to 60fps and that's just because it's optimized so well with AMD cards they're so horribly they're just a stutter a lot the frame is constantly dropping an FPS so you kind of end up with these really jarring stutters when you Pan the camera left to right it looks like you're losing huge chunks of frames and almost like it's repeating some of the previous frames which is called stuttering and that is an issue only on Andy cards with far cry 4 Nvidia does not exhibit it it's perfectly fluid on Nvidia and I think that's probably an artifact of Ubisoft partnering with end of it with Nvidia looks like they didn't even test for AMD so hopefully a patch will fix some of this I ran the day one patch and the most recent 14 11.2 catalyst beta drivers and it still did this so no luck so far if you own AMD I would say hold back on your purchase until Ubisoft announces a fix for these issues because it is completely unplayable even on a 290x at 66 FPS just it's really jarring to play that said on very high settings from ultra you can see that the performance is still very good it jumps up about 10 FPS for some of the mid-range devices the 270x is now in the 60 FPS range so it actually jumps 20 FPS between ultra 2 very high and then moving down to medium we've got the 750 Ti suddenly sitting in the 60 FPS range very definitely playable at that setting with the 750 Ti and then low you can kind of see those settings and check the link in the description below for all these charts this last one is the Nvidia special setting that is only available on video and video cards and check the link description below for the full review of or the full benchmark review I should say of far cry 4 there is another video on my channel go hit the gamers exes channel linked below and you'll find what the game looks like at 1080p at 60fps so that will give you a good idea of what we're dealing with here in terms of graphics technology that's all for this video please subscribe if you like this video like it it really helps us and I will see you all next time peace