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Gaming Tests: Far Cry 5

The fifth title in Ubisoft's Far Cry series lands us right into the unwelcoming arms of an armed militant cult in Montana, one of the many middles-of-nowhere in the United States. With a charismatic and enigmatic adversary, gorgeous landscapes of the northwestern American flavor, and lots of violence, it is classic Far Cry fare. Graphically intensive in an open-world environment, the game mixes in action and exploration with a lot of configurability.

Far Cry 5 is an Ubisoft game, which muddles the waters a bit. On a positive note, Ubisoft have made using UPlay with automation a lot easier in recent months, so that no longer becomes an issue even when there is a UPlay update. Also, Ubisoft is a big fan of the in-game benchmarks, which for Far Cry 5 is an on-rails recreation of in-game events showcasing close up and far viewing environments, plus explosions and gun fights.

Due to FC5 having a massive issue when it comes to what monitor you are using, we’ve lost extensive amounts of hair when dealing with different resolutions the game can detect on each monitor. In my home office, I have two brands of 4K monitor for our testing: Dell UP2415Qs and cheap £200 27-inch TN panels. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t like us changing the resolution in the results file when using the Dell monitors, resorting to 1080p but keeping the quality settings, and surprisingly the resolution scaling. In order to make the game more palatable across every monitor, on 7/20 (the day of this article), we decided to fix the resolution at 1080p and use a variety of different scaling factors to give the following:

• 720p Low (0.5x scaling)
• 1440p Low (1.3x scaling)
• 4K Low (2.0x scaling)
• 1440p Max (1.0x scaling)

Automating the game has been tough. Aside from the resolution issue, which has really only come about the day I’m writing this, this game has the same two downsides as every Ubisoft in-game benchmark: no easy entry, and a disaster of a results file (if it outputs one at all). The first point is like many of the games here – there is no simple command line to start the benchmark, and we have to resort to loading the game and manipulating key presses to get the benchmark started. The second point, on the disaster of a results file, is essentially hell.

It is a positive that Ubisoft outputs a file here. The negative is that the file is a HTML file, which showcases the average FPS and a graph of the FPS detected. At no point in the HTML file does it contain the frame times for each frame, but it does show the frames per second, as a value once per second in the graph. The graph in HTML form is a series of (x,y) co-ordinates scaled to the min/max of the graph, rather than the raw (second, FPS) data, and so using regex I carefully tease out the values of the graph, convert them into a (second, FPS) format, and take our values of averages and percentiles that way. Technically because we only have FPS data for every second of the test this isn’t the true percentile, but this is the best approximation we have.

Unfortunately because we've changed our Far Cry 5 setup today to ensure consistency, we have to current data at this time.

If anyone from Ubisoft wants to chat about building a benchmark platform that would not only help me but also every other member of the tech press build our benchmark testing platform to help our readers decide what is the best hardware to use on your games, please reach out to ian@anandtech.com. Some of the suggestions I want to give you will take less than half a day and it’s easily free advertising to use the benchmark over the next couple of years (or more).

All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.