Far Cry 4 Dual Core Woes...now resolved

[MrJim]

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.

[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

[MrJim]

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

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!

[outwar6010]

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.

[KeyboardDemon]

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.

[MrRockliffe]

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)

[KeyboardDemon]

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'!

[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.

[MrRockliffe]

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).

[deejayburnout]

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 ?????

[KeyboardDemon]

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.

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.

[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.

[Biscuit]

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.

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.

In heavy FP operations, the chip acts more like a quadcore than an octocore, but it still has 8 cores....

[deejayburnout]

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.

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

[MrJim]

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.

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.

Edit!
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Your next post answered my questions

[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.