Introduction

The most unexpected addition to Ubisoft's smash-hit open-world shooter franchise, Far Cry Primal is a most unusual FPS since it lacks guns! The setting is central Europe, 10,000 BC, in the fictional valley of Oros where an embattled mankind struggles to find its place against nature. You have a handful of melee and short-range weapons at your disposal with which to face and tame some of the most deadly creatures that walked the Earth back then—woolly mammoths, wolves, and saberteeth.

Based on an evolved Dunia 2 engine, which used to drive Far Cry 4, among other games, "Primal" takes advantage of DirectX 11 to conjure up some of the most stunning natural vistas. It particularly leverages some of the new hardware to render details such as dense vegetation, animal fur, and groovy flame effects.

In this article, we put our selection of performance-thru-enthusiast graphics cards through "Primal" to give you a decent idea of how well it runs on some of the most common graphics cards at four popular resolutions, including 1080p, 1440p, and 4K Ultra HD.

Settings

The game comes with the typical settings for a Dunia-based game. Due to the engine's design (deferred shading), multi-sample anti-aliasing is not available. The highest setting is SMAA, a shader-based smoothing algorithm.

Another useful option is the ability to adjust the field of view to avoid motion sickness on larger monitors; its range goes up to 120 degrees, which is a good maximum value.

Users of NVIDIA graphics cards will miss NVIDIA Gameworks effects like HBAO+, TXAA or Hairworks.

Pro-tip: to skip the intro on game startup, launch with the -skipintro parameter.

In-game Screenshots