VRAM Usage, Wrap Up
Before wrapping things up, here's a look at some older GPUs using the normal quality preset at 1080p. Here we see that the old GTX 580 and its 1.5GB frame buffer really can't get the job done and sadly the performance was far from playable. The GT 1030 also suffers the same fate, as does the GTX 650 Ti, while the GTX 950 was borderline playable.
From the red team, the HD 7790 was no good and nor was the RX 550, though you should be able to get playable performance out of the R7 260X.
For a more optimal experience, the GTX 680, 770 or HD 7950 will be required. At the top of the graph and not that far behind the RX 570 we find the R9 290, 280X, HD 7970 as well as the GTX 780 Ti.
I was hoping for a greater performance uplift when using the normal quality settings, though while the RX 570 only saw a 14% boost, the GTX 1050 Ti became 25% faster. Overall, when running at 1080p using the normal quality preset the game is very playable on a wide range of graphics cards.
Here's a quick look at VRAM allocation using the ultra quality preset at the three tested resolutions. As you can see, the game allocates around 3GB of memory at 1080p, 3.5GB at 1440p when available and 4GB at 4K. You'd expect this to make the 3GB 1060 a stuttery mess at 1440p and 4K, but honestly it wasn't really any different from the 6GB model.
Wrap Up
Well, that concludes our initial Far Cry 5 testing and we can say right out of the gate that this game looks and plays well. Although we've only just stuck to testing with presets, there's a reasonable amount of quality settings that can be fine-tuned for those that like to really tweak the visuals.
Having just checked out Warhammer: Vermintide 2 and been super impressed with how well that game ran on both AMD and Nvidia hardware, it's great to see another title that's well optimized for both Radeon and GeForce owners. Then again, neither title is riddled with GameWorks, so maybe the well balanced performance shouldn't be too surprising.
Next up, I'm keen to throw a few dozen CPUs at this title and of course compare a wide range of Coffee Lake and Ryzen processors. From what I've seen so far, Far Cry 5 looks well optimized for the core-heavy Ryzen CPUs, so we should see some competitive numbers.
We'll also look at revisiting this benchmark when Nvidia releases a game-ready driver – we just have to wait and see what kind of performance gains that will bring. For now we can say that Far Cry 5 runs well on Nvidia hardware, though it's the RX Vega GPUs that have impressed us the most, particularly Vega 56. It's a real shame this card isn't as competitive in more titles.
Update: We checked out the new Nvidia drivers that bring Far Cry 5 optimizations. We tested on the GTX 1060, 1070 and 1080 Ti and no performance uplift was noticed. We'll report back if we find anything worth noting.