Far Cry 4 Dual Core Woes...now resolved

I recently bought two copies of Far Cry 4, hoping to enjoy some co-op gaming with a mate. Although the game runs perfectly on my main PC which has an Ivybridge 3570K quad core CPU, it refuses to run at all on my secondary PC, which uses a Core 2 Duo E8400 dual-core CPU. Of course it's partly my fault, since the minimum CPU stated in the spec for the game is an i5 760 quad core. I had at least hoped that it would run on my E8400 system, albeit at lower settings. I just wondered whether anyone was in a similar situation? The cheapest route to a quad-core system for me was to upgrade the E8400 to a Core 2 Quad Q8300, which I've managed to buy for a few quid on Ebay. Has anyone else tried the game on similar hardware? I suspect a full upgrade might be needed though if I want to run two copies of the game, unless Ubisoft release a patch of some sort.

From what i have been reading there is no way around it at the moment. The funny thing about it is that in TotalBiscuit's "Port Report" he found that a single core was heavily loaded and the other cores were barely utilised.

I think its just a case of being a relatively poor port, typical Ubisoft behaviour :(

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Originally Posted by Biscuit

From what i have been reading there is no way around it at the moment. The funny thing about it is that in TotalBiscuit's "Port Report" he found that a single core was heavily loaded and the other cores were barely utilised.

I think its just a case of being a relatively poor port, typical Ubisoft behaviour :(

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I'm hoping that Ubisoft will take note of the annoyance of owners of dual-core systems, & will release a patch to sort it out...although I'm not holding my breath. I've got a Core 2 Quad coming from Ebay shortly, & from what I've seen on Youtube, it seems that it should take care of the problem. No doubt the price of such CPUs on Ebay will spike a bit if there are lots of people in the same situation!

I don't theres any rig thats ubisoft proof. On my rig i'm getting quite a lot of stuttering. However the unity problems did actually make ubisofts stock drop like 9%. So hopefully things change fast.

The great thing about Ubisoft games is you can't play them for too long, the games usually crash before that much time has been spent on them. ;)

Isn't ubisoft the publisher rather than the developer? I didn't think it was up to them to build the game (although they should make sure it works well)

Yes, they are the publisher, however I based my comments on some of their recent titles, Assassin's Creed Unity, Watch Dogs and now Far Cry 4 all seem to be leaving customers with issues.

I tried Far Cry 4 on my PC (on my friends Ubisoft account as he wanted to see it running on my PC and monitor) and in space of around 3 hours we experienced 4 crashes taking the game to desktop because it was 'out of memory'!

My biggest issue with FC4 is the fact is is not optimised for AMD cards and its chewing through my system memory like mad. It does seem to chew through my 4 cores on my Phenom 965 as well.

No game has pushed my RiG so hard.

As above, there so seem to be issues with spreading the CPU load across multiple cores (ironic since they state minimum requirements are 4 cores).

Looks like it was a rushed release as there has been 3 updates already and the 4th one has been delayed. You would think that these issues would be fixed before realise .

Even no default FOV adjustment until the day 1 patch. Shouldnt that be standard for all PC games ?????

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Originally Posted by deejayburnout

My biggest issue with FC4 is the fact is is not optimised for AMD cards and its chewing through my system memory like mad. It does seem to chew through my 4 cores on my Phenom 965 as well.

No game has pushed my RiG so hard.

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Are you saying it uses all four cores, I think I'll have to test it on my FX8350 rig and then see how many cores it uses on my i7 rig too. Unfortunately I don't have a rig with an AMD GPU to test it with though.

It'd be interesting to see how the 8350 handles it - I'm sure I read somewhere that it's an 8 core in the same way that an i7 is (meaning it uses an AMD equivalent of hyoerthreading). May very well be wrong though.

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Originally Posted by MrRockliffe

It'd be interesting to see how the 8350 handles it - I'm sure I read somewhere that it's an 8 core in the same way that an i7 is (meaning it uses an AMD equivalent of hyoerthreading). May very well be wrong though.

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Its not quite like that, but its not totally a true Octacore either. The chip is made up of 4 modules, each module has 2 Integer processing units and a shared cache. The floating point resources are also shared, there is 2 x 128bit units that can combine to be a single 256bit for workloads which require it.
http://pinoytutorial.com/techtorial/...agram-img1.jpg
In heavy FP operations, the chip acts more like a quadcore than an octocore, but it still has 8 cores....

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Originally Posted by KeyboardDemon

Are you saying it uses all four cores, I think I'll have to test it on my FX8350 rig and then see how many cores it uses on my i7 rig too. Unfortunately I don't have a rig with an AMD GPU to test it with though.

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On my rig anyways it does. I always monitor temps / CPU usage / ram usage with widgets on my second monitor. Playing easily uses 80% of each core. My GPU ram is about 1.8GB and my system ram it uses about 6.5GB. All this at high settings on a HD7850 running at 1680 x 1080.

I don't know why it uses 6.5GB of system memory but is crashes out after about an hour. Only way to prevent it is to put the quality settings to low and the system ram usage goes down to about 5GB.

Sounds crazy but that's the way it runs

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Originally Posted by deejayburnout

My biggest issue with FC4 is the fact is is not optimised for AMD cards and its chewing through my system memory like mad. It does seem to chew through my 4 cores on my Phenom 965 as well.

No game has pushed my RiG so hard.

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Hmm, that probably doesn't bode well for my Core 2 Quad coming shortly then. What resolution & settings are you running it at?

I was hoping to get my old system through to next year, so I can upgrade my main rig to a Broadwell or Skylake system, but the upgrade might have to come sooner if the C2Q isn't up to the job.

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Your next post answered my questions :)

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.

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Originally Posted by deejayburnout

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.

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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...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DB3qnl7Tiyg

The RAM usage is just over 2Gb too.

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

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.

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Originally Posted by 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

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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.

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Originally Posted by MrJim

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.

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UBI seem to be fully in the nVidia gameworks fold.

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.

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Originally Posted by 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.

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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).

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

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

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..........

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.

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!

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.

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Originally Posted by Ferral

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.

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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.

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!

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

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Originally Posted by kalniel

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.

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I'm sure you're absolutely right there. Nail on the head.

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Originally Posted by MrRockliffe

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

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Very true! I would have had to upgrade my main PC (3570K) & transferred that over to my second machine instead. This new quad core Q8300 should now see me through until next year, when the new architectures are released. Hopefully.

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Originally Posted by kalniel

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.

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That's not necessarily the case at all though - the consoles share a base ISA with PCs but the similarities largely stop there. You cannot take an executable compiled for a console and run it on PC, and nor can you just recompile it with some different compiler flags or minor tweaks. There really are huge differences between the platforms especially when it comes to data movement, and on top of that you even have issues like having complete freedom to use newer codepaths on the consoles like AVX - doing that on PC would either break compatibility with the majority of systems, or require multiple binaries.

A minimally optimised, barely-tested PC port will always be a minimally optimised, barely-tested PC port. I don't see how high-level ISA compatibility changes that TBH. Though it still always seems popular to 'blame the consoles' for any problems the PC platform has, because, you know, the PC is incapable of having problems of its own. (Not aimed at you BTW, just something I hear/read a lot)

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Originally Posted by watercooled

That's not necessarily the case at all though - the consoles share a base ISA with PCs but the similarities largely stop there. You cannot take an executable compiled for a console and run it on PC, and nor can you just recompile it with some different compiler flags or minor tweaks. There really are huge differences between the platforms especially when it comes to data movement, and on top of that you even have issues like having complete freedom to use newer codepaths on the consoles like AVX - doing that on PC would either break compatibility with the majority of systems, or require multiple binaries.

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Indeed, but the differences are fewer and lesser than with the powerPC and Cell based architectures.

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A minimally optimised, barely-tested PC port will always be a minimally optimised, barely-tested PC port. I don't see how high-level ISA compatibility changes that TBH. Though it still always seems popular to 'blame the consoles' for any problems the PC platform has, because, you know, the PC is incapable of having problems of its own. (Not aimed at you BTW, just something I hear/read a lot)

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Well no - the lack of gamers willing to pay enough to justify the costs of such a diverse install base are the cause of issues on the PC. The consoles just give us a glimpse of what might have been ;)

Agreed on both points. I'd expect the similar ISA to somewhat reduce porting time, but like I say it's only a part of the issue. It might reduce the time to get some functional code but it's quite an orthogonal matter;
High-level functions may be compatible despite ISA and architectural differences.
Low-level functions or e.g. in-line assembly can potentially break even with these x86 consoles, an example being AVX code, anything relying on internal busses exclusive to consoles, any non-CPU code (these consoles have a ton of potential for GPGPU programming as well as onboard DSPs and various other coprocessors, the code for which could not be directly copy-pasted to PC).

So I would think it's entirely possible that ISA compatibility only concerns a minority of porting time.
One example of something susceptible to suboptimal porting would be code which is directly compatible (e.g. AMD64 integer) but also specifically, perhaps hand-optimised for Jaguar, taking architectural idiosyncrasies into account. In theory code like this should still run on other desktop CPUs, but performance may be suboptimal.

However, I'm nonetheless uneasy with the theory that x86 consoles=faster porting=worse ports. There are just too many variables to assume that. Even assuming the faster functioning ports part is true, why does that directly lead to worse ports? If devs aren't interested in making a decent PC port and thoroughly testing it, why would having to spend less time on code porting exacerbate that?

Just as there's a difference between getting x86-console code functional on PC, to getting it running well on PC, that still applies to the starting point being PPC, ARM, MIPS, etc. After all, it's not like we didn't have terrible ports from the PPC consoles!