[gamegpu] Far Cry 4 performance

[f1sherman]

once one of thoses MSAA types are selected

so you do need MSAA??

....
I asked you twice already... and this is your 3rd post overall on Nvidia/MFAA & reviewers topic,
and you still haven't given the direct quote on "nvidia pushing reviewers"

lets just drop it, OK

 

[f1sherman]

/deleted

 

[tential]

MSAA at 4K isn't really something I worry about too much anyway. MSAA at lower resolutions sure but when I'm at 4K, if I have to turn off MSAA so be it. As long as I can hit 4K with playable framerates I'm happy.

 

[Silverforce11]

The foilage, rocks, mountains, shadows, grass all look last/current gen to me (FC3+) not next gen. Witcher 3 blows it away and Witcher 3 is a 3rd person open world game (that in theory should never look as good as a next gen FPS title). Did you actually zoom in on the picture you linked to me? The performance hit of 2X with MSAA is in no way justifiable either.

Well it's Ubi, MSAA takes a massive performance hit in ACU as well. It looks like they didn't bother to optimize it, period.

Whereas in Frostbite, its a deferred rendering engine as is Ubi's engine for AC, but DICE worked to optimize MSAA so it incurs a moderate ~25% performance hit, not massively as we're seeing here. Now, you guys can argue all you like about brands, but I trust that DICE >>>> Ubi when it comes to game engine optimizations.

The more accurate way is that MSAA is going the dinosaurs on Ubi games, because with Gameworks pushing shader AA, they just won't take the effort to optimize proper MSAA. There's the argument that shader based AA is fine, but it's not when it blurs the game, detracting from all that wonderfully crafted high-res textures. I know Ubi thinks it's more "cinematic" to have a blurfest running at 30 fps, but certainly that view isn't held by many PC gamers. A proper AAA PC game is expected to deliver multiple optimized AA modes.

 

[Abwx]

so you do need MSAA??

....

Only to validate MFAA, if you enable MSAA and do not select MFAA in the GPU management panel the card will run on MSAA, but once MFAA is activated MSAA will be replaced by MFAA, i think it s clear enough that you need it only as a validator on the management panel but that it wont be enabled on the game itself, dont understand why you re insisting that MSAA will be enabled, all the purpose of MFAA is to not use MSAA because :

MSAA takes a massive performance hit in ACU as well.

 

[f1sherman]

i think it s clear enough that you need it only as a validator on the management panel

no, it's not clear at all that having working MSAA is unnecessary

and it's funny coincidence that all MFAA games have built-in MSAA support

 

[Abwx]

and you still haven't given the direct quote on "nvidia pushing reviewers"
K

I do not have the habit to troll and do made up statements on the behalf of others.

De manière évidente, Nvidia préfère voir les choses sous le premier angle et ne verrait pas d'objection à ce qu'un testeur compare les performances des GeForce en MFAA 2xT à celles d'une Radeon en MSAA 4x.

"In an obvious maneer, Nvidia prefer to see the things under the former angle and would see no objection that a reviewer compare the performances of Gforces in MFAA 2xT with the ones of a Radeon on MSAA 4x".

It is clear enough, actualy you didnt read the article and are just dodging.

no, it's not clear at all that having working MSAA is unnecessary

and it's funny coincidence that all MFAA games have built-in MSAA support

That s a marketing implementation, so the gullible think that MFAA works additionaly to MSAA while it wont, all the purpose is to offload the GPU thanks to this recycled anti aliasing interpolation.

 

[f1sherman]

Im guilty of glancing through the article, because google translate is terrible.
But your claim is still a leap:

It is less easy to observe aliasing when the movement is important and compromise made ​​by Nvidia is not insane. Because of course, as always with antialiasing, it is a compromise that you can view from two angles: the MFAA 2xT offers more performance for overall quality close to that of 4x MSAA or more quality than just 2x MSAA for a measured impact on performance. Obviously, Nvidia prefers to see things from the first angle and would have no objection to a tester compares the performance of GeForce MFAA in 2xT to those of a Radeon 4x MSAA.

Seems like innocent speculation on author's part, even somewhat funny,
as opposed to him actually being pushed into comparing NV MFAA with AMD MSAA?

And its actually the other way. Nvidia insists on comparing unaltered, original images as envisioned by programmer, and without any driver trickery or additional optimizations.
I might find this statement, if you are as persistent as I have been with you

 

[Enigmoid]

Oh man, yet another game where NV seems to have completely forgotten to optimize for Kepler architecture vs. Maxwell. 970 > 780Ti and 280X is just 5 fps slower than 780 at 1080P. Ridiculous. I would be sooo pissed if I had purchased the 780 at $650 and 780Ti at $700 at launch. Jeez, the 970 is as fast as a 690.

Man, I'd be so pissed if I bought a 290 to get two measly fps over a 2980X.

 

[raghu78]

Another review from pclab and sweclockers.

http://pclab.pl/art57559-6.html
http://pclab.pl/art57559-7.html

Can't tell why R9 290X performance is so different from one review to another. Much better here especially at 1600p. Is it god rays or PCSS+ or MSAA. AMD better fix the performance for those cases.

http://www.sweclockers.com/artikel/19647-snabbtest-grafikprestanda-i-far-cry-4

AMD better fix those min fps too

 

[DiogoDX]

Another review from pclab and sweclockers.

http://pclab.pl/art57559-6.html
http://pclab.pl/art57559-7.html

Can't tell why R9 290X performance is so different from one review to another. Much better here especially at 1600p. Is it god rays or PCSS+ or MSAA. AMD better fix the performance for those cases.

http://www.sweclockers.com/artikel/19647-snabbtest-grafikprestanda-i-far-cry-4

AMD better fix those min fps too

Is not tesselation because 285 is slower than 280. But the performance in the 285 is weird becuse the min fps are lower than 270X.

 

[njdevilsfan87]

To be fair, FC4 actually looks GOOD with maxed out settings.

That LOOKS like it should take insane GPU power to hit and the image correlates to it.
If you took our the character model, you could almost say that's a real life photo.

The lighting looks good, but the textures (as usual with cross platform games) just look so console. I wish Ubi would allow PC modders to do their thing like they have done with Skyrim. "Modded FC4" would be amazing.

 

[tential]

The lighting looks good, but the textures (as usual with cross platform games) just look so console. I wish Ubi would allow PC modders to do their thing like they have done with Skyrim. "Modded FC4" would be amazing.

The sad part is that it's FREE for them to allow it to happen. So why not? They get more press in that regard too. How much press did Skyrim get over mods? Tons of extra articles on websites about "Look at FC4 with xyz mod!!!!" or "Look at FC4 with ENB Lighting mod x818xbestestevermod!!!!"

Just a ton more exposure.... for a company like Ubisoft trying to milk every penny from a game you'd think this would be mandatory...

 

[njdevilsfan87]

The sad part is that it's FREE for them to allow it to happen. So why not? They get more press in that regard too. How much press did Skyrim get over mods? Tons of extra articles on websites about "Look at FC4 with xyz mod!!!!" or "Look at FC4 with ENB Lighting mod x818xbestestevermod!!!!"

Just a ton more exposure.... for a company like Ubisoft trying to milk every penny from a game you'd think this would be mandatory...

You've have me sitting here like, "look at my modded FC4 using 5-6GB of VRAM on my Titans! Runs like total crap (or looks so cinematic) but looks awesome!!!"

But also, modding Skyrim gameplay mechanics alongside of graphics has turned "modded Skyrim" into such a better product than the vanilla version. I'm also surprised Ubi wouldn't want to give the PC community modding capability of a sandbox game that screams for this kind of community activity. Elder Scrolls modding capability is really what sells that series, imo. It's not like Besthesda has had any issues selling DLC either.

 

[Carfax83]

Whereas in Frostbite, its a deferred rendering engine as is Ubi's engine for AC, but DICE worked to optimize MSAA so it incurs a moderate ~25% performance hit, not massively as we're seeing here. Now, you guys can argue all you like about brands, but I trust that DICE >>>> Ubi when it comes to game engine optimizations.

If you're referring to Battlefield 3 and 4, I already told you that they use a much less sophisticated lighting setup (mostly prebaked with few dynamic light sources) than AC and Far Cry 4. That's why the performance hit for MSAA is comparatively much lighter.

Look at Dragon Age Inquisition if you want to a more meaningful comparison. DAI has a much larger performance hit for MSAA than BF4, because it uses a type of global illumination..

 

[Silverforce11]

If you're referring to Battlefield 3 and 4, I already told you that they use a much less sophisticated lighting setup (mostly prebaked with few dynamic light sources) than AC and Far Cry 4. That's why the performance hit for MSAA is comparatively much lighter.

Look at Dragon Age Inquisition if you want to a more meaningful comparison. DAI has a much larger performance hit for MSAA than BF4, because it uses a type of global illumination..

Here's the cool thing about Frostbite, if you're not happy with MSAA quality or performance, you can run it via downsampling (in DAI & BF4).

Set it for 1600p and you get a crisper image on your 1080p setup, that's FASTER than running 1080p with 4x MSAA (due to the IQ & perf penalty of deferred renderers).

These features are going above and beyond the expected for a AAA PC developer. It's something Ubi doesn't give think about with their console mentality.

 

[3DVagabond]

Oh man, yet another game where NV seems to have completely forgotten to optimize for Kepler architecture vs. Maxwell. 970 > 780Ti and 280X is just 5 fps slower than 780 at 1080P. Ridiculous. I would be sooo pissed if I had purchased the 780 at $650 and 780Ti at $700 at launch. Jeez, the 970 is as fast as a 690.

http://gamegpu.ru/images/remote/htt...U-Action-Far_Cry_4-nv-ultra-FarCry4_1920_.jpg
http://gamegpu.ru/images/remote/htt...U-Action-Far_Cry_4-nv-ultra-FarCry4_2560_.jpg

Without MSAA, with God Rays, 980 gets 30 fps at 1600P:

http://gamegpu.ru/images/remote/htt...-Action-Far_Cry_4-nv-test-FarCry4_2560_nv.jpg

This means with God Rays and MSAA, this game will have major performance issues at 1440/1600P besides 780Ti SLI/970 SLI/980 SLI.

The performance hit with MSAA in this game is > 2X at 4K. :sneaky:

http://gamegpu.ru/images/remote/htt...GPU-Action-Far_Cry_4-nv-test-FarCry4_3840.jpg

http://gamegpu.ru/images/remote/htt...U-Action-Far_Cry_4-nv-ultra-FarCry4_3840_.jpg

At this pace of PC game optimization, 2x GM200/390X will be paperweights for 2016-2017 PC games at 4K.

I don't know what's happening to PC gaming lately, with FC3.5+ requiring insane GPU power with maxed out settings, Unity running like garbage and DAI plagued with DRM. :twisted: I really want to ditch my 7.5 years old Westy for 32-37" 4K but I really don't have the budget for Quad-flagship GPUs every 2 years. I guess MSAA is going the way of the dinosaurs at this pace. With 2x the performance hit, it's not going to be even remotely feasible to use it at 4K.

They need to keep us upgrading somehow. I've felt for a long time that they just continue to artificially load GPU's to kill performance.

 

[3DVagabond]

The sad part is that it's FREE for them to allow it to happen. So why not? They get more press in that regard too. How much press did Skyrim get over mods? Tons of extra articles on websites about "Look at FC4 with xyz mod!!!!" or "Look at FC4 with ENB Lighting mod x818xbestestevermod!!!!"

Just a ton more exposure.... for a company like Ubisoft trying to milk every penny from a game you'd think this would be mandatory...

Support for modders is not free. It can actually be a PITA for the devs to have to offer continuing support. Now, I don't agree with not doing it though. I think the biggest part of the "magic" with PC gaming is the fans turning it into their own. It's a special breed of Dev that finds the pleasure in watching their game grow and evolve further than what they had envisioned.

 

[raghu78]

One more FC4 performance review is up. Ultra with SMAA. AMD makes an excellent showing with R9 290X beating GTX 970 and GTX 780 Ti. Nvidia has work to do according to the reviewer. ubisoft also has a lot of work to do to fix stability.

http://www.techspot.com/review/917-far-cry-4-benchmarks/page4.html
http://www.techspot.com/review/917-far-cry-4-benchmarks/page3.html
http://www.techspot.com/review/917-far-cry-4-benchmarks/page2.html

"Given that we found the Radeon R9 280X to be faster than the GeForce GTX 780 at every resolution, there's no doubt some controversy will follow these results.

We figured something was wrong from the get-go so we contacted Nvidia and they suggested using the newer 344.75 drivers, which were given to us prior to being made public -- initially we were using the 344.65 WHQL. The new driver was pressumably tweaked for Far Cry 4, though the release notes don't make any performance claims. Alas, with the suggested release installed, we didn't receive a single extra frame. We should also point out we are testing with the latest version of Far Cry 4 (v1.3 as of posting).

For all Radeon cards we used the Catalyst 14.11.2 beta driver, which has also been updated for Far Cry 4. AMD claims up to a 50% performance increase over the Catalyst 14.11.1 beta in single-GPU scenarios with anti-aliasing enabled.

It's worth mentioning this latest beta driver doesn't support CrossFire. The CrossFire profile for Far Cry 4 is currently disabled while AMD works with Ubisoft to investigate an issue where CrossFire configurations are not performing as intended.

Getting back to Nvidia's poor performance... we can confirm that the 344.75 driver was used while Far Cry 4 has been patched to the latest version through Uplay. We asked Nvidia if the performance we saw was unusual or different to what they have seen and they have yet to reply.

As it stands, we believe AMD is getting the most out of its Radeon graphics cards in Far Cry 4 and don't expect to see many performance improvements in the future, with the exception of CrossFire setups. Nvidia on the other hand have some work ahead, which is hard to believe with Far Cry 4 being Nvidia-sponsored."

So AMD cards perform well with Ultra and SMAA. so the gamegpu results with Ultra and SMAA were not a anomaly. AMD still has to fix MSAA and Crossfire performance. Nvidia cards do well with MSAA but with SMAA they could improve performance.

 

[BFG10K]

Not at all, it need FXAA enabled but there will be no MSAA, according to Hardware.fr Nvidia is in favour of reviewer comparing Gforce with MFAA to Radeons with MSAA 4X in reviews...

Huh? FXAA has absolutely nothing to do with MFAA. MFAA uses a base MSAA and blends the results between frames. It's actually very similar to TXAA in many respects.

In theory the performance hit should be a little higher than the base MSAA due to the overhead of the multi-frame blending and the post-filter calculation, and in practice that's exactly what we're seeing:

 

[3DVagabond]

Any possibility that GCN being in the consoles is helping being better optimized for AMD so soon after release?

 

[Silverforce11]

I don't understand the poor showing from Kepler, especially the 780 and 780ti, it makes no sense why they should be so far below Maxwell.

 

[abcodi123]

Thanks, i have been looking for a good gpu to run this game, this chart has helped me!

 

[Gloomy]

Any possibility that GCN being in the consoles is helping being better optimized for AMD so soon after release?

If we're taking wild guesses, then I'd say it's probably this combined with Nvidia getting in late in development.

Judging from the bugs and totally different lighting with Nvidia's tech it's safe to say Gameworks integration was a rushjob.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Any possibility that GCN being in the consoles is helping being better optimized for AMD so soon after release?

nVidia got fixed just as fast in other games that was pro AMD.

Also look at where the R9 285 sits. Down below with the HD7950.