Originally Posted by
mwelling12
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My specs:
i7 2600k OC'd to 4.5GHz
8GB RAM
GTX 980 4GB OC'd to 1265MHz, 1510MHz boost
250GB SSD
144Hz VG248QE Asus monitor
Windows 7 x64
Running MSI Afterburner with OSD for framerate and GPU information
I am someone who likes a very smooth gaming experience. Far Cry 4 is a demanding title on the GPU. That's good news. PC has needed titles to push its increasingly powerful hardware over the last few years. I usually run games at 120 fps locked, because this is what feels most smooth to me. In Far Cry 4, I can't manage 120 fps constantly with the graphic options turned up to where I want them. But that's fine with me. I've capped the framerate myself with Afterburner to 95 fps. I can run it at 95 fps constantly, and for the most part, it looks and feels great. I was running most settings on High, with Textures and Post Processing set to Ultra. AO to HBAO+ and God Rays to volumetric fog.
That is, until I started driving around on a vehicle. I noticed that as you move around the environment rapidly, there is severe stuttering. My framerate often suddenly plummets from 95 down to 65 or 70, before recovering. For those who will say "well it's still above 60, so what?" a sudden drop like this is VERY noticeable. It's as if the screen freezes for a split second. This is not tolerable, especially when it's occurring while traveling all over the environment while on a vehicle.
I noticed that, if I turn Textures all the way down to Medium, these stutters are mostly gone. All other settings can remain at High, Very High, or Ultra. I can even turn all settings (except Textures, of course) up to their highest, and this stuttering does not occur, as long as Textures is at Medium or Low.
This, of course, points to a problem with Far Cry 4's Texture Streaming. My video card has 4GB of VRAM. It is not nearly maxing it out. Additionally, my game is on an SSD. My system RAM usage is barely over 50% while the game is running. This is not a hardware problem. The game simply cannot stream the large High/Very High/Ultra textures in on the fly fast enough to keep up with the player traveling around the environment quickly.
I am assuming the solution needed is a patch. Because if I can't run the game smoothly with high end hardware, I'm assuming those with middle or low end hardware are having the same issues. Ubisoft needs to dedicate some time to making sure the game can run well enough on PC, because these types of issues (i.e. issues that users cannot fix by tweaking or upgrading their hardware) are not acceptable.