The latest Far Cry is out now, titled Far Cry New Dawn and we are taking a look at all of the graphics settings available to see the sort of performance implications each option might have on your PC.
Use the sliders below to compare the visual impact each graphic option has when you set them from Ultra to Low.
Far Cry New Dawn has 10 graphics settings including the preset options. Some are just on off choices, whereas others range from low to ultra. If you slide your mouse over the images below you can see how each extreme graphics setting contrasts with its counterpoint. Click on an image to enlarge it in a separate window for a closer look. Then take a look at the accompanying frame rate performance percentage cost we recorded across our gaming PCs. And that should give you a great jumping off point to see whether you think the specific option's cost is worth the visual boost, or perhaps save a few FPS by turning something down or off.
How much of my graphics card VRAM will Far Cry New Dawn use?
In our tests it looks like Far Cry New Dawn will use around 3GB VRAM from your GPU when playing at Ultra on 1440p and our reports show that will drop to 2.69GB VRAM at 1080p Ultra. This lowers further to 2.33GB VRAM at 1440p Low graphics settings and 2GB VRAM at 1080p on Low presets.
NOTE: We have noticed that sometimes all the graphics setting images below do not load into this page for the sliders. Just refresh this page to get them to load.
Graphics Presets Low vs Ultra Screenshots
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Preset option overview: Ok the presets are the quick way to change all the sub options you can see in screenshots below to either Low, Normal, High or Ultra, or perhaps on/off in just one switch. Far Cry New Dawn runs on the latest tweaked Dunia Engine and this title purposefully looks a little overly saturated, to enable the bright vegetation colours to pop,giving the game an almost cartoony feel to it. Setting to the Ultra preset in New Dawn does look good, but nowadays there are other game engines that push the graphics visuals far further. By contrast the Low preset looks very bland indeed but opens the game up to a large number of lower end machines.
Preset Performance Cost Low to Ultra: 27% FPS loss
For an example of frame rates achieved take a look at the in-game FC New Dawn benchmark report for a GTX 1070 Ultra vs Low at 1440p
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Texture Filtering Screenshots
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Texture Filtering overview: Otherwise known as anisotropic filtering, this setting will put texture into the games surfaces. Without this option New Dawn will feel flat, lacking in depth.
Texture Performance cost: 1% FPS loss
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Shadows Screenshots
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Shadows overview: When you increase the quality of shadows in New Dawn the result is less square looking or blocky shadows. This comes at a slightly higher performance cost than texture filtering and in game doesnt feel quite as significant to the immersion. If the world seems flat and untexture then you are likely to feel something is not quite right with the world, whereas you might not notice if a shadow is smoothed around the edges or a bit jaggy.
Shadows Performance cost: 3%
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Geometry & Vegetation Screenshots
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Vegetation overview: This option is best described as how much lush vegetation is rendered in the world. When you slide across the vegetation screenshots above you can see the layers of vegetation added into New Dawn between Low and Ultra settings. Interestingly if you lower this option you are not really going to feel like the world is empty or bland, but if you raise it you will likely enjoy a richer environment feel. So not damaging to your immersion if you lower it, but it will enhance your immersion if you increase it.
Seeing as the frame rate performance cost is relatively high for Geometry and Vegetation, this is a good option to adjust down if you want to get extra frame rates without too much of a negative impact on how you feel when playing Far Cry.
Vegetation Performance cost: 9% FPS loss
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Environment Screenshots
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Environment overview: While this is called environment it seems to cover reflective surfaces and the quality of those reflections, we are mostly talking about metal and water here.
Similar to the environment setting above, this is a luxury option that you wont miss by turning it to low in Far Cry New Dawn, unless you have had it turned up on ultra previously. Another very good one to tweak and lower if you want to gain some extra frame rates.
Environment Performance cost: 7%
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Water Screenshots
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Water overview: In the screenshots above look towards the bottom of the waterfall to see the type of visual improvement you will see. The water cascading down in high setting looks far more realistic than when set to low. Obviously this is a still screenshot, so now try and imagine what that could do to your immersion when you encounter this in game. The occurrence of this option is fairly low frequency but likewise the overall performance cost is low as well. So turning it off isnt going to gain you too much, but then again you probably wont notice if you did turn it off, unless you like to stand in front of waterfalls contemplating your pixelated life choices for hours at a time.
Water Performance cost: 1.5%
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Terrain Screenshots
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Terrain overview: Right, this is a tricky one to see at first glance. I suggest clicking on the screenshot above to get the fully enlarged terrain screenshot. Then when you slide between high and low settings cast your eye over the bottom right quarter of the image. The detail of the dirt road is more realistic in high. Now that you can get a feel for the type of graphical improvement you will see it happens across all the mud areas in front of the houses, between the grass patches. In the smaller screenshot, at first glance, you might consider that you can see more/better shadows in low, but actually when you they are in the larger view you will notice a reasonable improvement in high across all terrain.
This is another New Dawn graphic option that would probably not be too upsetting to turn down, due to the subtlety of the improvements it delivers, but once you were familiar with the extra terrain detail on High you may not want to be without them. Surprisingly there doesnt appear to be any performance impact from terrain, so leave that on max.
Terrain Performance cost: 0% FPS loss
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Volumetric Fog Screenshots
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Volumetric fog overview: Ok the default screenshots arent the best way to show the fog graphics setting difference in Far Cry New Dawn so we are using our own ones. The visual difference between low and high Volumetric fog can be best seen around explosions and fires. When this option set to high the smoke blends together but gives better lighting depth to the smoke clouds as it billows outwards.
Volumetric fog FPS benchmark graph
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The performance impact on your PC of this option is surprisingly low, so another one you might consider just leaving on high. But I feel this option is more likely to cause issues to your PC when you are constantly destroying trucks and causing explosions all over the place. Then the performance hit might rack up. So certainly one to keep an eye on, despite the low performance cost recorded below.
Volumetric fog Performance cost: 0.5% FPS loss
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Anti-Aliasing Screenshots
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Anti-Aliasing overview: One of the old classic graphic options. There are a lot of straight edges in the world and they more often than not are at angles more than 90 degrees. Without this option on those straight lines will look like little flights of steps. This is known as jaggies. Turn on an anti-aliasing option and those lines are smoothed out. You want to do this. You want to turn this on and TAA doesnt cost too much in the way of hardware frame rate performance.
Anti-Aliasing Performance cost: 3% FPS loss
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Motion Blur Screenshots
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Motion Blur overview: This is a real like it or hate it option. For all the people trying to create videos for their channel, you always have to turn this off as it can ruin your video screen capture. When moving fast this option blends and blurs your peripheral surroundings as you rush past, giving the gamer a sense of speed.
Turn this on if you like it as the performance cost is minimal most of the time.
Motion Blur Performance cost: 0.2% FPS loss
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So after taking a look at the sliders above we can see that some of the Far Cry New Dawn options dont really improve or change the graphics to any significant level, some change it a lot but with minimum PC hardware performance implications and then others cost a bunch of FPS but are definitely worth having turned onto high at least, if your PC can handle it.
What PC hardware am I going to need to run Far Cry New Dawn smoothly?
You will need a 3 year old PC (or newer) to play on high graphics settings, 60FPS at 1080p. But you will need a 6 year old PC (or newer) to play FC New Dawn on minimum requirements, at low graphics setting achieving 30FPS.
There are alternative graphics options in Far Cry New Dawn, including V-Sync, Framerate lock, field of view scaling, adaptive resolution and resolution scales. All of which can help you customise your experience further.
Here are a bunch of interactive benchmarks we created to give you some interesting insights into the expected New Dawn performance across a combination of screen resolutions and graphics settings and fairly modern PCs.
Nvidia GTX 1070
PNY Nvidia RTX 2060
Let us know your experiences below with your favourite graphics options and most annoying graphics options.
[You get 2 VOTES in each poll below]
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PC Specs
nobody cares its a bad game
PC Specs
I get the feeling that not even pirates care about this crap
PC Specs
Looks overall fine to me.
PC Specs
I liked the way you give a screenshot sample and then alongside it you show the performance cost.
PC Specs
Who remembers the times where low settings looked like you were playing some low polygon game and high/ultra settings looked like reality?
Now low looks nearly identical to ultra besides render distance, light and for the most part aliasing.
PC Specs
Im quite glad actually. As the requirements get higher, it would be stupid for a new game at low to look worse than an old game that uses the same hardware. Sometimes graphics can have quite the impact on the enojoyment of the game. Im glad we're moving forward like this.
PC Specs
The problem imo is that you'd need a huge hardware upgrade to get the slight quality upgrade. It's just a shame that you can't really run new games on 3-4 years old medium end hardware because low settings aren't low enough (unless you have GTA5 like optimizations).
PC Specs
Well there are alot of other things other than graphics. For example mechanics and physics. There is just alot more code in the newer games, other than eye candy.
PC Specs
pink and more pink
PC Specs
Motion blur and DOF in games really suck i just want to stare at the environment but all i see is blurry images like WTF xD.