Conclusion

Playing "Far Cry Primal" feels a bit weird at first because of its uncommon prehistoric setting without any guns or other serious technology. However, after the first hour or so, you will have a good glimpse on what's going on in the game and how to master it, especially if you've played Far Cry before. The game uses a well-tested approach to character development and crafting. Even though the story feels quite linear, you will quickly be immersed by the beautifully rendered nature vistas.

Far Cry Primal's engine is Dunia 2, which was used in Far Cry 4 where it showed its full potential for open-world rendering with dense vegetation. While Far Cry 4 used NVIDIA GameWorks extensively, Far Cry Primal seems to make no use of it, and it looks like it's using its own implementations for fur rendering and similar effects.

The game runs well on modern hardware of all price points, even at Ultra, its highest setting we used exclusively throughout this article. VRAM usage is also reasonable, even though it slightly exceeds 2 GB even at lower resolutions, which can be mitigated by slightly dialing down details.

As expected, NVIDIA has released a game-ready driver today, which we used for our testing. AMD's 16.2 driver came out not too long ago and works really well with the game. Our performance numbers show that with increasing resolution, AMD cards do better; the Fury X, for example, edges past the GTX Titan at 2560x1440 and 4K while it is a good deal slower at lower resolutions.

The game's great overall video memory management appears to be rubbing off particularly well on AMD Fury series cards. However, it also comes with good multi-GPU support, so you should definitely consider a GeForce GTX 970 SLI setup over single-card solutions like the GTX 980 Ti or the R9 Fury X. We plan to make this game a regular game-test in our graphics card bench due to its incredible production design, good code, and great hardware support.