Far Cry 6

[Grogan]

Well, I can start a Far Cry 6 thread now

I've only just gotten through the linear, cut-sceney parts but it's been pretty nice. I can play it on Ultra, with 165 Hz Vsync (though I'm certainly not getting 165 FPS at those settings lol) and it's pretty smooth. I'm at the Libertad camp and have a FAL rifle now (which was always one of my favourites in these games).

The bad guy, Castillo, is a good villain. He reminds me a little of Gustavo Fring (from the Breaking Bad series')

P.S. I soon realized that's because it IS the same actor that played Gustavo Fring. Older, more wizened, nastier man in this, but it's him, Giancarlo Esposito

[Zema Bus]

I still have to get back to this one, I've been distracted by Assassin's Creed Odyssey

[Grogan]

I found the sweet settings for this game.

Refresh Rate 165 Hz, with Vsync (and frame rate limiting) OFF

All settings Ultra, except Texture Filtering set to High. It was probably using some aggressive anisotropic filtering or something at Ultra. It was just one last piece of the puzzle, it was pretty good but this made it smooth. I was surprised because usually texture filtering isn't expensive but that made a difference. Of course, stupid shit like motion blur turned off, always.

There are some funny mock Spanish names for things in this game.

First of all, the "Supremo" from Juan. A crazy launcher doohickey thing that I haven't quite figured out how to work yet. (I could never hit anything with the dynamite attachment). I just upgraded it though and I have different doohickeys on it.

Then, there's this harpoon gun called "La Clavadora" (literally the nailer)

Not to be confused with this 400 rpm, silent nail gun El Susurro I also got (but haven't had a chance to try yet)

Also, I seem to be getting these "Exploradora" points now lol

[Grogan]

So I'm fairly surprised at what I can enable here in this game. Not only Ultra everything (except no motion blur) and no scaling rubbish, DirectX raytraced shadows and reflections, adaptive sharpening (cleans up after antialiasing lol) and variable rate shading (VRS). That's actually just a performance shortcut, variable rate shading. The AMD version uses luminance, it cuts the resolution in dark areas where you can't see shit anyway.

fc6dxrfx.jpg (19.69 KiB) Viewed 361 times

The game looks gorgeous, with lighting and shadows and all now. I won't say it didn't harm performance (even more noticeable while driving) but it's definitely playable like this. I'm using 165 Hz and no vsync, and it's not choppy, it's more like a smooth slow down because it's not a limitation of anything else but those shader cores or whatever, allocated to it. I went right out and restarted the game to make sure I wasn't dreaming, too.

The previous 6700 XT card (RDNA2) was capable of enabling ray tracing settings, but in practice not really usable. (I tried just enabling ray traced lighting in Cyberpunk with that card and it was too hurty. I can't test that now though, I've removed it in disgust)

This is because AMD open sourced this shit. Everyone can use it, game devs, us, everybody. I do have the latest everything though (kernel, mesa, vkd3d-proton, wine etc. from like yesterday) but I didn't expect all those gimmicks to actually work

[Grogan]

Now, the real question is, did going through all that conversion process to UEFI so I could enable "ReSize Bar" (direct quote, including case, from my bios lol) actually help?

I think it did, and I thought this might be a prime candidate to show it. After some long load screens (shader compiles, new Mesa) and some initial pipeline work (fairly brief) this game settled down to being hardly able to notice I had that DXR ray tracing shit enabled. I was driving a big truck and crashing into shit too lol

While I was driving this truck too, I was driving on a wet mountain road (paved) after rain. Not flooded, but a layer of running water because the road was dipping into valleys and stuff. It looked so good... swoon. Lighting and shadows while walking in the forest is delicious too. Also, very realistic "haze" in the jungle after a rain. I almost felt hot and sticky, it was so realistic. Not exaggerated, but the way the air refracts etc.

Also tried Borderlands 3, which isn't anything advanced, but has ridiculously large datasets and bloated textures. It worked well, but I don't have a frame of reference to feel, like the recency of Far Cry 6 DXR the night before.

By then it was 8 o'clock in the morning though and it had to stop.

[Zema Bus]

That's good to hear

[Grogan]

I started some DLC called The Vanishing, by following up on this telepathic communication I got from this Russian lady telling me about this creature, La Devadora (the devourer). I went to a bunker when the game informed me I wouldn't be able to leave. It took away all my guns and gear and I had to find the portal to this other dimension, and blast through some bio matter with a giant laser to open it and enter to rescue Chorizo (the dog on wheels... how did he even get in the bunker?) before I close this portal for good. In this dark dimension, there's this entity that has turned everyone into... zombies that attack. I have a pistol and a shotgun and ammo is scarce, I have to melee with my "big knife".

The atmosphere is creepy, and it demos the ray tracing nicely, but I hate shit like that. I wish I hadn't have started it now.

[Zema Bus]

I was glad when that DLC was finally over lol! It gets more frantic near the end but you get access to much better weapons.

[Grogan]

Hah! I can thank this game's shitty (and evidently buggy) save system for getting me out of that DLC. There's only one running save (multiple slots for new games), and I could see no way out of it. So I resigned myself tonight to just playing it, and I was spawned outside the compound with the bunker, I'm not in that other universe anymore. The quest is still on "go to the blah blah and see what's up", I still have the two quest weapons, the shitty silenced pistol and shotgun, BUT my slot 1 and 3 weapons are equipped, and I have my Supremo and stuff. I'm out of the DLC, so I can just go play the rest of my game and change out those weapons when I get to a bench (I hope it lets me, because I don't think I can get back there now to finish the quest unless I can get back in and that portal is still open. I can't seem to get in that compound (though I didn't try hard, I just wanted to get out of there).

P.S. I'll bet that if I fast travel back to the village/base, Chorizo is there. That's usually how silly shit like this works. NPCs are back where they normally are if you leave a DLC.

[Grogan]

Am I ever glad to be back in my game! What happened was that I simply have those DLC mission weapons in my inventory now as Unique weapons. It let me change them out. I'm not sure if I can get back to that alternate dimension (that's pretty wonky save behaviour, I was a ways into that), but I don't care because I'm not going to play that. Also, Chorizo was back at the Montero base as expected. So... neener to that stupid quest lol

I just did a fun quest (with a sad ending... the whole thing was a setup) where I had to go with the Monteros to rescue some of their people that were to be executed. It ended with an exhilarating escape in the back of a truck. I just happened to have my incendiary assault rifle and with infinite ammo in the back of a vehicle, I was lighting up pursuing vehicles. I had to repeat it several times, because I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong. The truck kept getting blown up, and I'd either die or the mission would fail (If I'd gotten off). As far as I knew I had blown up all the enemies, but it kept happening.

It was so horribly scripted that even though I'd already destroyed the helicopter, I didn't destroy it at the right time. I figured out that I have to destroy the helicopter before the truck stops... to wait for me to destroy the helicopter (I presume?). If it gets to the part where the truck stops, it blows up for no reason after an elapsed time, even though there's nothing to blow it up. I was waiting for it to get closer to me and saw no reason why I couldn't (it wasn't even shooting at us yet). I was even trying repairing the truck but it wasn't down much, it only took a couple of seconds.

I'd be mad if I didn't love the sequence I was repeating

[Zema Bus]

Since you're not going back to that DLC, here's what the last 5 mins of it looks like, including Chorizo vomiting up an alternate reality slug creature

[Grogan]

Heheh... then he chomped it for good

That is a silly DLC.