Far Cry 4 Dual Core Woes...now resolved

[MrJim]

A mate of mine updated from his core 2 quad to a i5 and he said that made huge difference to his setup. He found that the c2q was bottlenecking his gtx 560ti. New chip and games run smoother with more FPS.

What worries me about FC4 is that I am running mine at the resolution I am due to my monitors maximum settings. I can imagine others will be at 1920 x 1080 and on similar cards to mine will be even poorer performance. Hopefully as update will fix this and it will run better.

Even overclocking the brains out of my GPU does no noticeable improvement apart from heating my room up more.

This Youtube video shows a Q8300 with a 750 Ti GPU at 1080p...it seems to load fairly evenly across all four cores, while the GPU is pretty much maxed out...



The RAM usage is just over 2Gb too.

[deejayburnout]

That's about how my phenom looks as well. I presume that is system ram its using up? It does look a lot smoother on a Nvidia card.

Edit

In case anyone cares

Both chips compared.

http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core2-...enom-II-X4-965

[KeyboardDemon]

I was hoping to take a look at CPU usage with my i7 and then compare it to the FX CPU but my nephew was working on project work, he uses the AMD rig for his Uni work and isn't keen on running MSI after burner so I need another GPU monitoring program to look at GPU usage.

On my PC with my res at 2560x1440 and ultra settings I was getting around 50 to 60 fps, cores 1,2,3 and 7 seemed to be getting the biggest loads each showing more than 60% usage but 0,4,5 and 6 were also seeing something happening with loads of around 20% or a little higher.

GPU usage was quite high too, typically it was hitting 100% with a few dips for cut scenes. Before starting the game I shut down all my browsers, quit Steam and made sure I had released as much ram as I could, I think I was at around 28% system RAM in use, but forgot to check how much RAM and VRAM was used by the game.

I'll try and compare both at 1080p and nVidia settings when I get the time.

[MrJim]

That's about how my phenom looks as well. I presume that is system ram its using up? It does look a lot smoother on a Nvidia card.

Edit

In case anyone cares

Both chips compared.

http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core2-...enom-II-X4-965

They are quite a close match. I'll be overclocking the Q8300 to 3ghz which might help a little. Far Cry 4 is a "Way It's Meant To Be Played" title, so it's possible that it's...err...'optimised' for NVidia cards. My second PC has my old GTX 670 in it, which should provide enough grunt for reasonable 1080p gaming. I hope.

[shaithis]

They are quite a close match. I'll be overclocking the Q8300 to 3ghz which might help a little. Far Cry 4 is a "Way It's Meant To Be Played" title, so it's possible that it's...err...'optimised' for NVidia cards. My second PC has my old GTX 670 in it, which should provide enough grunt for reasonable 1080p gaming. I hope.

UBI seem to be fully in the nVidia gameworks fold.

[KeyboardDemon]

FC4 was built using the an updated version of the engine used to create FC3, so other than adding the new tools to take advantage of some of the new features the devs would not have had any issues adapting to the dunia 2 toolset.



But yes, with other Ubi games that have come out recently nVidia does look to be their preferred flavour.

[MrJim]

FC4 was built using the an updated version of the engine used to create FC3, so other than adding the new tools to take advantage of some of the new features the devs would not have had any issues adapting to the dunia 2 toolset.



But yes, with other Ubi games that have come out recently nVidia does look to be their preferred flavour.

If that's the case, I do wonder whether the quad core requirement is an artificial one? My 3.6Ghz Core 2 Duo played Far Cry 3 without any problems at all (and that on a 1Gb AMD 5850 GPU too).

[MrRockliffe]

It probably is - when looking at CPU usage after gaming on my 3470 it's often only using 2 cores, and if it uses more they're no way near maxed out.

It's probably like when COD Ghosts came out - you had to have 6GB to launch the game but to run it, 4 was enough

[Ferral]

It is just an updated Dunia Engine from what I believe which was originally used on Far Cry 2.

The lack of PC optimisation as of late is getting crazy, not forgetting the silly VRAM requirements on some games. I believe that PC games are getting ported over from the PS4 which has a unified architecture which is a pool of system and video ram and can be allocated to whatever the programmers wish.

The thing is though PC is a split architecture with VRAM and system ram so a lot of these ported games aren't using the ram you already have to its full extent even though most of us are sitting here with 8Gb

[shaithis]

Yes, I've been saying since the first "next gen" ports that I believe HSA is the root of our issues. I can only image how much of a nightmare it is to re-write but I guess this is why so many are standardising on engines. Tune the engine on each architecture and then drop your game on top of it.

Certain titles (hello Shadows of Mordor) have gigantic VRAM requirements while having horrid low-resolution textures, something is seriously wrong.......Now add Ubisoft into the equation..........

[Ferral]

Yeah, look at AC Unity as another example.

AC Black Flag runs spot on with my now 3yr old system, maxxed out 1080p and not a single stutter. Crysis 3 the same and my system is running it perfect.

Funnily enough I decided to try The Evil Within Demo, once again maxxed out 1080p and not a single stutter.

Something is going on that is not fair on PC users, I am starting to wonder if this has something to do with AMD & Nvidia wanting to push their latest and greatest hardware.

I have read that Watch Dogs on PC runs nicely on older hardware maxxed out 1080p, these issues have started coming more to light since development on PS3 & 360 has slowed a little and AAA titles are just XB1, PS4 & PC.

I think devs need to take a look at what they are doing, especially when it comes to PC users. Why should we have to spend hundreds on something like a new graphics card because they aren't utilising PC hardware properly.

[MrJim]

Well I'm happy to report that Far Cry 4 is now happily running on my second PC, now that I've upgraded to a Q8300 quad-core processor. I've given it a mild overclock from 2.5 to 3Ghz, which has definitely helped a bit. Much relief!

[Biscuit]

Good stuff I guess when they were doing the minimum requirements they thought it would be best to stick to the models that use the "i" nomenclature, as thats what most intel people have these days.

[kalniel]

I think devs need to take a look at what they are doing, especially when it comes to PC users. Why should we have to spend hundreds on something like a new graphics card because they aren't utilising PC hardware properly.

It's an age old problem - the cost/return for the PC market is so much worse than console.

I thought that the move to x86* processors would make porting better.. but I fear what's it's done is make devs spend even less time on it because they can get away with a minimum now. That has its benefits in terms of getting PC ports where they may not have been viable before, but could mean we're missing out on optimising the experience.

[MrJim]

It was a complete pain though - if I hadn't just paid £30 for the game, I don't think I'd have bothered! Whilst upgrading the processor I managed to dislodge a tiny motherboard jumper, which meant that I had a fatal error message every time I tried to boot. Luckily I found the jumper (something to do with PS/2 keyboard wake-on-lan) on my dining table after putting the system back together, and hey presto, it booted normally. Big sigh of relief!

[MrRockliffe]

That was a close call - could have ended up costing you a fair bit!