Far Cry New Dawn in the technology test

– Far Cry New Dawn continues Far Cry 5 in the post-apocalyptic future. BitcoinMinersHashrate looked at the game's technology. There are no great surprises, because the offshoot is strongly based on the original. This is also shown by benchmarks with various graphics cards and processors.

Far Cry New Dawn is bright, colorful and pretty

Far Cry New Dawn is not a completely new part of Ubisoft's game series, but is located in the same location as Far Cry 5, which has changed significantly 17 years after a nuclear disaster. Such a scenario is also used by many other games, but Far Cry New Dawn optically takes a completely different path. Because instead of many shades of brown and orange, the world is very colorful. Blue, violet, yellow, green and other bright colors determine the game world.

If you like colorful colors, the graphics in Far Cry New Dawn will please you. A minimally revised Dunia 2 engine is used, which is based on Far Cry 5 and therefore looks more like another card of the same game. But that is not a bad thing, because although the technology does not match graphic hits like Battlefield V or Metro: Exodus, Far Cry New Dawn offers an appealing look.

New Dawn is apparently no longer a gaming evolved game

Unlike Far Cry 5, New Dawn doesn't appear to be participating in AMD's game program. At least there is no AMD logo at the start of the game and FreeSync 2 HDR is not mentioned in the menu – even if HDR is supported. It is also unclear whether the accelerated FP16 shaders for Vega with "Rapid Packed Math" are still there.

Since Far Cry New Dawn is based on the same technique as Far Cry 5, this has given a lot of time to mature. BitcoinMinersHashrate explains how well the new offshoot works on the PC with several graphics card and processor benchmarks.

Ubisoft has always offered a top-class option menu in the last few games and this is also the case in Far Cry New Dawn. There are numerous graphics options, presets, a freely configurable frame limiter, downsampling and upsampling, dynamic resolution, sample images for each option and an integrated benchmark. The enthusiast heart could not ask for more.

The options “Low”, “Normal”, “High” and “Ultra” are available as graphic presets. "Ultra" is also the maximum possible level of detail. At first glance, the presets only result in minor changes. For example, the vegetation is further reduced with each step. In addition, only the ultra preset receives the most beautiful surrounding cover, which increases the quality quite visibly. "Low" is the only preset that has to do without "ambient occlusion" and therefore no longer looks nice.

Judging from the screenshots, the normal preset is an acceptable compromise. However, the "normal" LOD works aggressively so that objects pop up or disappear visibly in front of the player. This is annoying, which is why "normal" should only be used in the "emergency". The visual impact is low and this also applies to the performance gain. Even the extremes, the FPS gain between "Low" and "Ultra", are only 27 percent on the GeForce RTX 2070 and the Radeon RX Vega 64. Far Cry New Dawn cannot be optimized well with this. If the game is jerky and a major leap in performance is needed, only reducing the resolution often helps.

TAA does a good job of anti-aliasing

Far Cry New Dawn offers SMAA and TAA as anti-aliasing. While SMAA has the geometry well under control, the vegetation looks different. Alternatively, there is TAA including a temporal component, which also processes all trees, shrubs and the rest of the greenery. The TAA also does not do the job perfectly, but still at a high level. Overall, the picture is calm, especially in low resolutions such as Full HD, however, a slight blur overlays the picture. This is hardly noticeable in higher resolutions and then disappears in Ultra HD. TAA is the anti-aliasing of choice in Far Cry New Dawn. Since both cases involve post-processing anti-aliasing, the power loss is low.

Test series, test system and graphics settings

The following benchmarks were performed with a Core i7-8700K overclocked to 4.7 GHz, which can access a total of 32 gigabytes of RAM with a speed of DDR4-3200 (16-16-16-38, dual-rank). "Windows 10 October Update" (1809) including all currently available patches is installed. Adrenaline 19.2.2 and GeForce 418.91 are used as drivers. The AMD driver is officially optimized for Far Cry New Dawn. Nvidia does not mention the game, however, the same adjustments as in Far Cry 5 will probably be used anyway.

The 25-second test scene shows a sprint in the open world with a lot of foresight and vegetation. It's not a worst-case scenario, but it's a challenging scene that keeps appearing in the game.

In the three resolutions used, 1,920 × 1,080, 2,560 × 1,440 and 3,840 × 2,160, the maximum graphics details, i.e. the ultra preset, are used. There are no other adjustments.

On the next page: Graphics card benchmarks from Full HD to Ultra HD