Far Cry 4, Ubisoft’s new bird-attack simulator, is a very nice-looking game. Unfortunately, a lot of PC gamers are having issues getting it to run smoothly.
The game is generally a lot of fun, but the PC version suffers from regular micro-stutter, an issue with which PC gamers are becoming all too familiar. If you’ve been playing on PC, you’ve probably seen it: the game will be running at a solid 60fps, but then it will just sort of hang for a split second. Your frame-counter will drop to 59, or maybe it won’t drop at all, but your eyes will tell you something’s not quite right. It’s much more pronounced if you hop into a helicopter or drive a car.
It’s not the end of the world — I managed to have plenty of fun playing the game over the weekend, and I’m more sensitive to frame-rate stuff than most — but it is annoying and distracting. It doesn’t seem to be tied to your GPU either — I’m playing on a new GTX 970 and find that the game has stutter no matter what settings I run it with.
So far, Ubisoft hasn’t addressed the problem or patched it. Today’s 1.4 update on PC fixes a different issue, one where some users were getting a black screen at boot, though the only effect it’s had on my game is to significantly increase the length of the first loading screen.
Fortunately, there is a bit of a workaround. It won’t remove stutter from the game entirely, but I have found that it makes the game run much more smoothly. I’d seen this fix tossed around on some forums over the weekend, and finally tried it out when Eurogamer‘s Digital Foundry reported that it does indeed work.
Here’s what you do. Go to “My Documents,” open up your “My Games” folder and find the Far Cry 4 folder. In there, you’ll find your profile.xml file. (For me, my profile was located in another subfolder within the Far Cry 4 folder.) Then, make two changes: Change DisableLoadingMip0=”0″ to DisableLoadingMip0=”1″ and change GPUMaxBufferedFrames=”0″ to GPUMaxBufferedFrames=”1″.
After doing that, the game should run more smoothly, though it does sound like it reduces the quality of the in-game textures. (I haven’t really noticed, and prefer the smoothness at this point.) My game still has some small stutters, but it’s significantly improved from how it had been.
We’ll keep an eye out for any updates from Ubisoft on improvements to the PC version, as well as any more user-discovered tweaks. Also, I made this gif of an eagle attacking a mountain and didn’t have anywhere else to put it. Enjoy:
Comments
11 responses to “How To Get Far Cry 4 Running More Smoothly On PC”
It’s only turning off mip-mapping and frame buffers. it shouldn’t make it that bad. Mip-Maps are a series of progressively smaller textures for using when things are off in the distance. Up close it will look no different. Basically what detail level you choose in the texture options, will apply to everything in the scene So if you pick ultra-high, it’ll use like 4k textures on everything you see, rather than loading in a smaller texture for things further away.
If you set your detail to medium, it will probably use something like 1k textures on all things in the scene.
So yeah.. it shouldn’t make it too terrible. Textures might look a smidgeon noisy in some textures at a distance, but wont do much else. Obviously it needs retuning in the code to make it more efficient.
FC4 texture quality doesn’t work the way it does in other games. The base textures are mostly the same across all settings, but higher settings add bump mapping, specular maps and other layer details on top of the base.
It was a base example. Mip Mapping is everywhere man! 🙂
Fair enough =) I’m curious what the base texture size in FC4 actually is, considering the way they do textures, but I haven’t pulled the data files apart to look yet.
Just getting a new 4k monitor for 4k60 gaming. I can only imagine how amazing this is going to look.
Mine’s been crashing a certain section, but not at the opening screen. Here’s hoping this patch fixes that too.
With a GTX 980 i was getting an average 80fps on ultra @1080p settings before the Nvidia driver update but now after the update i am getting an average of 60fps.
Sure would be nice if just for once Ubisoft put out a PC port that didn’t suck.
This worked amazingly! Thanks!
I found that changing the mipmap and buffers did not, but I disabled Sli and it runs like a dream now.
nVidia will bring out an SLI specific patch soon. SLI is quite often problematic at launch these days….
I disabled /removed Uplay and my PC gaming experience is stress free.