Far Cry 6 Performance Review ft. Radeon RX 6600 XT

Far Cry 6 is the sixth main installment in the Far Cry series developed solely by Ubisoft Toronto. The game will launch on October 7, 2021, which is three years since Far Cry 5. According to the developers, far Cry 6 takes place on the fictional Caribbean island of Yara, which was inspired by Cuba. Yara is ruled by a fascist dictator, “El Presidente” Anton Castillo played by Giancarlo Esposito. The protagonist, Dani Rojas, is a guerilla soldier fighting for the freedom of Yara and end Castillo’s Dictatorship.

According to its developers, far Cry 6 has the largest Far Cry playground to date and uses the same Dunia Engine with further improvements and a new set of features for players to enjoy. Far Cry 6 is the first title in the franchise to require DirectX 12 out of the box, thus bringing Ray Tracing for the first time ever in Far Cry. The game also supports AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution scaling feature as Far Cry 6 is an AMD game title.

Far Cry 6 Recommended PC Specs

Specs to run Far Cry 6 isn’t as demanding for a 2021 triple-A title that is, if you’re willing to play without Ray Tracing. 1080p 60FPS at High Settings requires at least a GTX 1080 and RX Vega 64 to run, which is around the equivalent of more or less an RTX 2060 or Radeon RX 5600 XT for the latest graphics card. What’s honestly surprising in Far Cry 6’s requirements is the 16GB dual-channel memory requirement for 1080p 60FPS. Ray Tracing at 1440P requires the latest generation AMD Ryzen 5 or Intel i5 processors paired with the latest RTX 30 and RX 6000 graphics card. Judging from the specs, if you have a Gaming PC similar to our Php 50K Gaming PC Build Guide, you can probably run Far Cry 6 at High settings with ease.

Benchmark Setup and Methodology

AMD provided us with a game copy as well as access to the game’s press review version for us to test with the XFX Radeon RX 6600 XT Merc 308, which we recently reviewed.  We used the provided AMD Adrenalin 21.8.2 drivers for our benchmarks and CapFrameX v1.6.5 as our framerate capture tool. Unfortunately, we couldn’t test our Nvidia GPUs as we didn’t have the necessary drivers to run the game. However, we tried to run the game with the RTX 3080 Ti running 471.96 drivers, and the gameplay and framerate experience were sluggish at best.

For this review, we will be focusing more on the performance and graphics side of things rather than the gameplay itself. For the Far Cry 6 gameplay review, we recommend reading our gaming site’s, One More Game’s Far Cry 6 Review. We only had one day to test, so we opted to use the in-game benchmark tool due to the lack of time to advance to the game’s story and select a viable location. We tested out the game’s different settings preset, resolution scaling, as well as the performance impact of enabling AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution.

Settings Preset Benchmark

Far Cry 6 is relatively light to run as the RX 6600 XT managed to maintain over a hundred FPS in ultra settings preset. Switching the graphics quality to one tier preset lower reduces the overall framerates by 11% but switching from high to ultra preset has a 14 percent impact on our framerates. We recommend running Far Cry 6 at a high preset for the best balance between graphics quality and FPS output based on our results.

Resolution Benchmark

Bumping the resolution from 1920×1080 to 2560x1440p immediately shaves off thirty percent of our FPS in 1080p, albeit still playable as the RX 6600 XT manages to get an average framerate of 73.1 FPS. Scaling it up to 4K crippled our framerates to a measly 39 FPS bordering console-quality gameplay. Toning down the settings to High or mixed medium-high settings could make the RX 6600 XT run 60FPS at 4K resolution.

AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution Benchmark

AMD FidelityFX debuted last Computex 2021 as AMD’s equivalent to Nvidia’s Dynamic Learning Super Sampling or DLSS. AMD FidelityFX was officially released on June 22, 2021, and is made available for developers through AMD’s GPUOpen platform, Unreal Engine 4, and Unity game engines. FSR has four quality mode presets that are constant in any game that supports it. We tested out all four of the FSR quality modes on 4K Resolution with Ultra Graphics presets, and the results were quite satisfying considering we were only running a Radeon RX 6600 XT. Quality FSR mode made the game more playable as it manages to maintain over 60.6 FPS without that much loss in rendering quality. Bumping it up to FSR Balanced and FSR Performance modes quickly doubles our non-FSR framerates, but I wouldn’t recommend it for 4K resolution as you’re losing detail depth, especially in non-wide areas. For optimal gameplay quality and experience, we recommend tuning the graphics settings first before resorting to FSR as the feature is not that polished compared to Nvidia’s DLSS.

Conclusion

Far Cry 6 is a relatively light game to run despite its triple-A status as seen with our XFX Radeon RX 6600 XT Merc 308 graphics card. Far Cry 6 finally brings in the latest features and technologies that take advantage of the latest Nvidia GeForce RTX 30 and AMD Radeon RX 6000 graphics card. There are many options for users to tweak their settings to get their desired framerates without much compromise on graphics quality thanks to the DX12 API and the improvements behind the Dunia engine, albeit the performance scaling on higher resolutions could still be improved.

Head over to our gaming site, One More Game, for the Far Cry 6 Gameplay review.

Grant Soriano

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Grant is a Financial Management graduate from UST. His passion for gadgets and tech crossed him over in the industry where he could apply his knowledge as an enthusiast and in-depth analytic skills as a Finance Major. His passion allows him to earn at the same time help Gadget Pilipinas' readers in making smart, value-based decisions and purchases with his reviews and guides.