Introduction

After quite some delay, "Far Cry 5" is finally here. The fifth installment in the smash-hit open-world single-player FPS franchise is the fourth since Ubisoft took over the brand completely, making Far Cry 2 a significantly different game from the original. The recurring theme has been that of you playing as a misfit protagonist stranded in an open-world ruled by a crazy satrap, be it the forgettable diamond smuggler from Far Cry 2, memorable drug lord from Far Cry 3, or dictator from Far Cry 4. The only way out is to take down the evil ruler.

In Far Cry 5, you find yourself stranded in Hope county, Montana, a state that doesn't have the national attention it needs. White supremacist cults fueled by religion and guns run amok. At the head of one such cult is preacher (and this game's kill target) Joseph Seed, heading Project at Eden's Gate. His congregation is made up of disgruntled veterans, junkies, or just cookie-cutter a-holes. A failed attempt by the government to arrest Seed only ends up polarizing the locals and the cult, who plan a resistance movement against the government, with you caught in between.

Far Cry 5 is based on the very latest version of Ubisoft's Dunia Engine. Its designers focused on crafting as beautiful a world of the great American outdoors as they could without leveraging DirectX 12. What this means is that the DirectX 11-based engine can take advantage of legacy multi-GPU solutions such as SLI and CrossFire. There's enough eye-candy on tap to make even the toughest graphics hardware break a sweat. Far Cry 5 is an AMD sponsored title, which means owners of Radeon graphics cards could be in for a treat.

In this performance review, we put Far Cry 5 through our selection of contemporary graphics cards backed by the latest optimized drivers on our VGA test system. We measure the game's performance across various screen resolutions, investigate VRAM usage, and even test the game's multi-core CPU performance scaling.

Screenshots

Graphics Settings

• The first settings screen deals with monitor settings
• As expected, the game has options to choose the screen resolution, aspect ratio, and refresh rate
• You can also toggle between fullscreen, windowed, and borderless

• The second settings screen lets you adjust graphics details and effects
• The four predefined performance profiles are "Low", "Normal", "High", and "Ultra".
• The anti-aliasing options are None, SMAA, and TAA
• Most people hate motion blur, but you can easily turn it off on this page

• The third screen deals with some additional settings
• V-Sync can be disabled completely
• A FPS lock is available, with the possible values ranging from 30 FPS to 144 FPS
• Field of view can be adjusted from 60° to 120°
• The "Resolution" option lets you adjust the rendering resolution, so you can run at your monitor's native resolution (crisp texts and HUD) while reducing the graphics hardware requirements. Options available here range from 0.5x to 2.0x. The values above 1.0 can help reduce aliasing, but with a large performance hit.