sean10mm
07-12-2004, 07:00 AM
What follows is just my experience fooling around with Far Cry settings, running Fraps time demos with various combinations of features, and comparing the outputs. I'm posting it on the off chance it might be helpful to others with similar systems sort out what works best when trying to get the right balance of speed and looks. My specs are:
P4 3.2E HT 800 MHz FSB 1MB L2 cache
1 GB PC3200 400MHz DDR RAM
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128 MB graphics card
Maxtor 250 GB 7,200 RPM hard drive
I've broken it down into the following categories, in order of their relative importance.
1. Far Cry detail settings, excluding anti-aliasing (AA) and anisotropic filtering (AF).
These settings have the biggest impact on how nice the game looks, obviously. You get a nice improvement in appearance going from Low to Medium and Medium to High, and a proportional hit on frames per second (FPS). However, going from High to Very High seems to give you very little improvement... but you take a big hit on performance going from High to Very High.
Suggestion: Unless you have a monster system and want to max everything out "just because," go no higher than High for any of these settings. You will get 99% of the visual goodness of Very High at High... and about 10 FPS more speed.
2. Resolution.
Again, this is pretty obvious. What isn't obvious is that the performance hit for going to a higher resolution may be smaller than the performance hit for going to a higher level of AA or AF, but give you a bigger visual improvement. Because Far Cry's outdoor areas let you see very far away, you seem to gain more visual benefit from higher resolutions than you would in some other 3d games.
Going from 1024x768 to 1152x864 cost about 10 FPS on my system if all other settings are kept equal. However, 1152x864 with 2xAA 1xAF ran fractionally better than 1024x768 with 4xAA 1xAF or 2xAA 2xAF, and looked better, especially outside.
Suggestion: You want as much resolution as you can run fast at High detail. Going up 1 level of resolution doesn't seem to gain or lose your any more FPS than changing other features, but can give you more visual improvement (see below)
3. Anti-Aliasing.
Each improvement in AA (0x to 2x, then 2x to 4x) had about a 5-10 FPS penalty, and each step up does make your edges look nicer and less jagged. If your card can handle it, you probably always want at least 2xAA, but sometimes it looks better to jump up to the next higher resolution instead of going from 2x to 4x AA. More than 4xAA seems like a waste of time to me, beyond showing off. Not that there is anything wrong with that.
Higher AA settings appear to help most in indoor areas with very high contrast, which sometimes still have some jaggies with 2xAA at lower resolutions.
Suggestion: A little AA with more resolution is better than a lot of AA with less resolution, but some AA is always nice.
One other note: I disabled AA in the Far Cry settings, then set the AA to what I wanted to use in the ATI control panel. I've been 100% bug-free since doing that.
4. Anisotropic Filtering.
The performance hit for increasing AF levels is about the same as that for increasing AA levels (5-10 FPS), but the improvement in picture quality is actually very small going from 1x to 4x, at least to my eye. Basically, all it did was make ground textures look a little better when you are looking at them from further away. Since there is so much rolling terrain and ground vegetation in Far Cry, you can rarely see enough ground to tell the difference, and very distant terrain looks exactly the same with 1x or 4x AF.
Suggestion: AF is the last thing you should turn up. Increase it when you already have fast frame rates with everything else turned up already.
What does this all boil down to? Well, if your system can't quite run Far Cry at 1600x1200 with 4xAA and 4xAF at 70 FPS, it is worthwhile to try different combinations of settings to get the best visuals at good, playable speeds. For instance, 800x600 at Very High detail for everything and 4xAA 4xAF looks much worse and ran slower than 1152x864 at High detail with 2xAA and 1xAF.
P4 3.2E HT 800 MHz FSB 1MB L2 cache
1 GB PC3200 400MHz DDR RAM
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128 MB graphics card
Maxtor 250 GB 7,200 RPM hard drive
I've broken it down into the following categories, in order of their relative importance.
1. Far Cry detail settings, excluding anti-aliasing (AA) and anisotropic filtering (AF).
These settings have the biggest impact on how nice the game looks, obviously. You get a nice improvement in appearance going from Low to Medium and Medium to High, and a proportional hit on frames per second (FPS). However, going from High to Very High seems to give you very little improvement... but you take a big hit on performance going from High to Very High.
Suggestion: Unless you have a monster system and want to max everything out "just because," go no higher than High for any of these settings. You will get 99% of the visual goodness of Very High at High... and about 10 FPS more speed.
2. Resolution.
Again, this is pretty obvious. What isn't obvious is that the performance hit for going to a higher resolution may be smaller than the performance hit for going to a higher level of AA or AF, but give you a bigger visual improvement. Because Far Cry's outdoor areas let you see very far away, you seem to gain more visual benefit from higher resolutions than you would in some other 3d games.
Going from 1024x768 to 1152x864 cost about 10 FPS on my system if all other settings are kept equal. However, 1152x864 with 2xAA 1xAF ran fractionally better than 1024x768 with 4xAA 1xAF or 2xAA 2xAF, and looked better, especially outside.
Suggestion: You want as much resolution as you can run fast at High detail. Going up 1 level of resolution doesn't seem to gain or lose your any more FPS than changing other features, but can give you more visual improvement (see below)
3. Anti-Aliasing.
Each improvement in AA (0x to 2x, then 2x to 4x) had about a 5-10 FPS penalty, and each step up does make your edges look nicer and less jagged. If your card can handle it, you probably always want at least 2xAA, but sometimes it looks better to jump up to the next higher resolution instead of going from 2x to 4x AA. More than 4xAA seems like a waste of time to me, beyond showing off. Not that there is anything wrong with that.
Higher AA settings appear to help most in indoor areas with very high contrast, which sometimes still have some jaggies with 2xAA at lower resolutions.
Suggestion: A little AA with more resolution is better than a lot of AA with less resolution, but some AA is always nice.
One other note: I disabled AA in the Far Cry settings, then set the AA to what I wanted to use in the ATI control panel. I've been 100% bug-free since doing that.
4. Anisotropic Filtering.
The performance hit for increasing AF levels is about the same as that for increasing AA levels (5-10 FPS), but the improvement in picture quality is actually very small going from 1x to 4x, at least to my eye. Basically, all it did was make ground textures look a little better when you are looking at them from further away. Since there is so much rolling terrain and ground vegetation in Far Cry, you can rarely see enough ground to tell the difference, and very distant terrain looks exactly the same with 1x or 4x AF.
Suggestion: AF is the last thing you should turn up. Increase it when you already have fast frame rates with everything else turned up already.
What does this all boil down to? Well, if your system can't quite run Far Cry at 1600x1200 with 4xAA and 4xAF at 70 FPS, it is worthwhile to try different combinations of settings to get the best visuals at good, playable speeds. For instance, 800x600 at Very High detail for everything and 4xAA 4xAF looks much worse and ran slower than 1152x864 at High detail with 2xAA and 1xAF.