There are certain games that just feel like they’re meant to be played on a PC. Far Cry has always been one of those games — for me, at least. If you’re in the same camp, Ubisoft dropped some useful info about the game’s technical requirements today. Turns out the yak farm will cost you in more ways than one!
Sorry, bad joke. Yak or no yak, here are the specs Ubisoft outlined in a blog post today:
MINIMUM
- Supported OS: Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8/8.1 (64bit versions only)
- Processor: Intel Core i5-750 @ 2.6 GHz or AMD Phenom II X4 955 @ 3.2 GHz
- Memory: 4GB
- Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 or AMD Radeon HD5850 (1GB VRAM)
- Direct X: Version 11
- Hard Drive: 30 GB available space
- Sound Card: DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card with latest drivers
OPTIMAL
- Supported OS: MS Windows 7 SP1, MS Windows 8/8.1 (64bit versions only)
- Processor: Intel Core i5-2400S @ 2.5 GHz or AMD FX-8350 @ 4.0 GHz or better
- Memory: 8GB
- Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 or AMD Radeon R9 290X or better (2GB VRAM)
- Direct X: Version 11
- Hard Drive: 30 GB available space
- Sound Card: DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card with latest drivers
These are pretty middle-of-the-road for minimum requirements today, if you compare to them to some of the other major shooters that have come out in recent months — Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and Wolfenstein: The New Order being the first two that come to mind. What stands out to me, then, is that the game’s specs are surprisingly…unremarkable, especially considering how steep the ones for Assassin’s Creed: Unity are. Granted, Ubisoft’s other big open world game that’s dropping this month is a new-gen console only game, while Far Cry 4 will still be appearing on the Xbox 360 and PS3.
Something about this discrepancy between two of Ubisoft’s upcoming products leaves me feeling a little miffed, mostly because, again, Far Cry has always been the kind of game I want to play on PC more than anything else. But I guess that’s assuming that super high system requirements means that a) the game will actually require the stated amount of power to run properly and b) that means it will be “better” in some way. Gamers have more than enough experience at this point to know that neither of those are true. In either case, I suppose it’s nice to see that the developers are keeping last-gen gamers in mind when it comes to offering people the rare chance to ride on top of a weaponised elephant.
Now let’s just see if the game is actually, you know, good.
Comments
30 responses to “Your PC Needs This Many Yaks To Run Far Cry 4”
Well thankfully I have the 4GB GTX680 instead of the stock 2GB model but it’s fast becoming apparent that this is just enough and I need to start thinking about upgrading my PC 🙁
this is ubisoft remember.. they have no fucking clue about how to optimize their games for PC
I dunno, FC3 ran pretty sweet on my rig. But maybe not optimized. It certainly wasn’t as bad as Crysis, at any rate.
No clue how to or just pure laziness?
I think its more of a business thing, you have a budget for making games as we all know and that includes things like like optimization of course. That said. How much time would you dedicate to optimizing a system that is exponentially harder, due to hardware differences/combinations when it shares far less of market then its console counter parts.
As the pc market grows (and it is) and companies get behind pc gaming as a whole such as amd creating mantle to make it easier on devs/give better performance to gamers, Valve aiming to make a os that has gaming in mind and trying to unify pc gaming as a whole giving it a voice/wallet it so sorely needs, we will see less issues like this.
I think a lot of pc gamers need to remember while its hardware leaves consoles in the dust (by a massive amount) it also has a lot of hurtles that can cripple even the most hardened pc game devs. Not every company is trying to make the biggest space sim ever created, thus having the extra grunt the pc has is not always needed. This results in pc gaming becoming somewhat of a second thought due to its smaller market share.
I recall seeing a couple of weeks ago, a dude from Ubisoft saying they don’t care about optimizing for PC.
His reasoning was something like “They will complain at first, then give up and buy it anyway because they want to play it.”
Evil, evil company.
They only care about churning out sequel after sequel to reap the financial benefits.
Or do ANYTHING right.
Maybe I shouldn’t have bought the 660Ti. Or maybe it was the right choice to buy third-best. I never know now.
There’s a fair difference between a gtx 680 and a 290x. Is this what amd were saying about nvidia gameworks causing amd cards to run worse?
If it’s a shooter, it’s meant to be on the PC. That includes the console-exclusives. It’s MEANT to be on the PC, controlled with the godly precision of keyboard-and-mouse instead of the sluggish, ham-fisted aim-assist of a gamepad.
Your comment made me hungry for ham…
I hear the “Mouse and Keyboard” argument alot for FPS, but i seem to manage just fine with a controller, so i guess everyones diferent?
If you mastered KB+M as much as you have mastered gamepad, you’d call the game-pad-using-you a noob.
I use both… both are good but i can see why the people talk down on controllers cos they are SO HEAVY on aim assist and thats really cheap in my opinion
Someone who only knows how to do breaststroke will generally consider it to be better than Freestyle, which they don’t know how to do, but Freestyle will always be faster. But as long as people doing breaststroke only compete against people doing breaststroke, they won’t have to realize that.
But someone who’s familiar with freestyle will feel like they’re going much slower than they are capable of, and they’d be right.
It’s more that one is better than the other. It’s been proven, and it’s the reason Microsoft decided that they will never allow the two to mix.
I’m a PC gamer at heart and have been since consoles went 3D but one must understand that people have preferences regardless of the fact that one way is utterly, completely and undeniably superior to the other. Personally I wouldn’t bother to play fps without keyboard and mouse but if some simpleton prefers a controller then good on em and my respect goes to them for being a gamer.
Sure you can manage with a controller, but no one can deny the precision a mouse brings!
Genuine question: Do you have to crank up the difficultly well above ‘normal’ when playing single player shooters on the PC these days?
The last FPS I played through on the PC was Half Life 2 a million years ago and that was before the days of designing shooters to be played on a console from the ground up.
I’d imagine that designing a game to be played with a ‘ham-fisted controller’ (that I’ve come to accept) would make the normal difficult a breeze with a decent mouse/keyboard combo.
It’s a bit like reverse Diablo III, where the duel sticks and dodge ability make the game a breeze on consoles.
REALLY depends on the game.
What you’ll often find is that many console versions of shooters (like CoD, Halo, Destiny) have a hidden/non-removable aim-assist that slips crosshairs closer to body-shots and head-shots than the typical movement of the stick. Some go so far as to track targets. This means that functionally, you end up with less adjustment required to pull off the same (or at least similar) kind of headshots you’d be doing with ease on KB&M.
And sometimes there are more factors at play than how well you aim, such as gear/levels. Eg: The original Borderlands.
That said… yeah. A lot of the time when you play the same game on different platforms, you will want to play at a higher difficulty on PC than Console.
When the developers can’t/don’t make their own adjustments to a game as part of the porting process, it’s very obvious. Something a lot of folks don’t realize is that PS3 could take a keyboard/mouse combo, and that this was patched into Dust 514. The difference was night and day, and even then, the first iterations came out with intentional developer-implemented artificial restrictions to sensitivity and responsiveness to handicap the KB&M. To avoid having it be the only viable control method. KB&M still turned out to be vastly superior anyway, even with the handicaps.
Pretty sure everyone knows the old Microsoft experiment. A team of seasoned FSP pros on gamepads put up against KB&M newbies and got fucking destroyed, which is why we can’t have
nice thingscross-platform play.A lot of folks will say they think they play better/just fine on their gamepad, but that doesn’t take into account the developer-changed variables such as enemy accuracy & spawn frequency and player gun recoil/spread (all of which are easy tweaks to make the PC experience similar to the console experience), the invisible/hidden auto-assist features, and comparing something they’re used to against something they’re not used to.
Even moderate familiarity with KB&M would see them realizing they thought breaststroke was their fastest swimming technique simply because they didn’t know how to freestyle.
I agree that aiming is clearly easier with KB+M, but controllers are better for everything else. Moving, strafing, special moves etc. Plus there’s the distinct lack of carpal tunnel you get with a controller.
A gtx 680 or a r9 290x?! This optimising for one brand over the other has got to stop. It’s ridiculous…
I’m in a very tough position. I really loved FC3 and Blood Dragon so I’ll definitely be getting FC4 on either the PS4 or PC. But therein lies the question. Upgrade my graphics card, or just get my PS4 before the FC4 launch? I want a PS4 for Uncharted 4 if nothing else, so I’ll definitely be getting one at some point, but on the other hand, I know FC4 will be a lot better on PC with mouse and keyboard, but wont be able to do coop with my friend who’s also getting a PS4! And I’m a bit strapped for cash, so I can’t really buy a new GPU and a PS4 🙁
Help? Advice?
The PS4 and Xbone are apparently getting hardware revisions next year to shrink them to 20nm.
This will make them use less power and run cooler and therefore last longer. They may also be shrunk in size (Like the PS3 Slim). Im waiting until Uncharted 4 is actually on store shelves before picking up my PS4.
Yeah, heard about the Xbone slim revision and it makes sense that Sony would try doing the same. And, they’d probably release their version before or when Uncharted 4 hits too. Guess I can wait for a while until then, not like there’s anything else on PS4 demanding my immediate attention. Now, whether and what I should upgrade my GPU to…
Sign up to overclockers.com.au and goto the PC sale section. Everyone there is selling their 6 month old 3GB R9 280x’s for 150 bucks down from 400 so they can buy GTX 970s/980s.
Wow, thanks for the tip 🙂 Will do!
I haven’t heard anything about it, but I won’t be surprised if they come out with hard drive upgrades.
Its all just rumour currently but it sounds legit.
http://www.trustedreviews.com/news/slim-xbox-one-plans-teased-by-cost-reduced-processor
looks like i have more than enough Yaks to run this on high
The system requirements aren’t very steep considering that my PC, which is getting pretty old (4 years?) meets the minimum spec and was only middling spec at that time that I bought it. Admittedly, I’m not very demanding of game graphics.
The slowdown in the speed with which PCs have been getting faster has been pretty dramatic. Used to be 50% per year, now it’s about 20% per year.
Still, looks like I’ll need get a new box soon.