Far Cry 2 technical thread

[Sarkus]

Q6600
4 GB RAM (though Vista32 sees it as 3+)
9600GT
1280x1024

Defaulted to high setting with no AA. Haven’t messed around with those nor have I updated my drivers. Seems to run great and looks as good as Crysis ever has on this rig with better framerates.

[nabeel]

Those new beta drivers made my performance worse :/ Not by a lot though; minimum and average framerates were almost same, but the max framerate was lower by 4. The benchmark tool sure is a great thing to have. Overall performance is great though, I have everything maxed except for a few things like tree and post-processing I think.

[DoomMunky]

@mono

Playing at 1920x1200. Other than the annoying black window at launch issues, the game looks and plays quite well, for the 5 minutes I’ve had to mess around. Sadly, it’s obviously attended the Bioshock pre-patch school of Field of View. I think I may keep playing Crysis and STALKER until some brilliant 17 year old comes up with an FOV hack.

Is that why my head hurts? I find it taxing on my eyeballs to play this game. I haven’t had to take a break from a shooter in months. Not since STALKER has my head hurt like this.

Damn FOV.

[Chris_Remo]

@datter

Another solution for the windowed problem (in Vista anyway) is right clicking the shortcut -> properties -> compatability -> disable visual themes.

Boy, thanks for this. XML fix wasn’t working for me–this did it. Finally able to play.

[Igor_Muravyev]

Any benchmarks for 2560x1600 yet?

[wumpus]

Hint: pressing CTRL+ENTER cycles between windowed and fullscreen.

I guess that’s a programmery thing because it’s what I always do in the “ooh, that’s a window and I want it to be fullscreen” secenario and it’s always worked.

[Chris_Remo]

@wumpus

Hint: pressing CTRL+ENTER cycles between windowed and fullscreen.

I guess that’s a programmery thing because it’s what I always do in the “ooh, that’s a window and I want it to be fullscreen” secenario and it’s always worked.

That was the first thing I tried earlier today, but sadly it had no effect.

[Chris_Nahr]

I guess wumpus meant to write Alt+Enter. That’s the usual Windows shortcut for fullscreen mode, as I recall.

[wumpus]

oops… alt+enter. yes. Sorry, that was my bad. the same key that works to take a command line to fullscreen in windows, for example.

[Killzig]

Is anyone else having trouble getting the Steam key to validate with the online profile creation? I already have a ubi.com account (I’m assuming it’s the same one I used for the passport/etc, maybe I’m wrong) and I enter the CD key (w/o -) but the thing keeps telling me I have an invalid CD key.

I’m also getting this SOUND.DLL error at start up but the game loads up fine after I click through two error prompts.

[mono]

@Killzig

Is anyone else having trouble getting the Steam key to validate with the online profile creation? I already have a ubi.com account (I’m assuming it’s the same one I used for the passport/etc, maybe I’m wrong) and I enter the CD key (w/o -) but the thing keeps telling me I have an invalid CD key.

I think I already had an Ubi account, but I made a new one anyway, and everything worked.

What’s this benchmark utility that a couple folks mentioned? I didn’t notice any in-game benchmarking option.

[Killzig]

@mono

I think I already had an Ubi account, but I made a new one anyway, and everything worked.

What’s this benchmark utility that a couple folks mentioned? I didn’t notice any in-game benchmarking option.

From the Steam forum:

The map editor, benchmarking tool, and dedicated server can all be found in your Steam folder in
[B]…steamapps\common\far cry 2\bin[/B]

[Velvet_Elvis]

@Igor Muravyev

Any benchmarks for 2560x1600 yet?

I tried it at that resolution briefly with Very High settings for everything.

Q6600
8800 GTX
4 GB RAM

Es non bueno. I’m pretty sure that SLI would be necessary to run at that resolution with anything approaching decent performance.

[TheWombat]

I found that on my system, E6850 and HD 4850, DX10 simply did not work. It was a slide show interspersed with moments of fluidity. DX9 works fabulously, though.

Also, running from Steam caused the game to install PunkBuster, .net, and Visual C++ each time I ran the game, but the shortcut from the executable itself in the Steam folder works much faster and easier.

[DoomMunky]

@TheWombat

I found that on my system, E6850 and HD 4850, DX10 simply did not work. It was a slide show interspersed with moments of fluidity. DX9 works fabulously, though.

Also, running from Steam caused the game to install PunkBuster, .net, and Visual C++ each time I ran the game, but the shortcut from the executable itself in the Steam folder works much faster and easier.

Weird. DX10 is no problem for once, for me.

Double weird with all those installations every time you start from Steam. That hasn’t happened to me, well, ever.

[Fugitive]

ATI might just need to update their drivers like Nvidia did. DX10 is still so underused that it’s not really fully stabilized yet.

[TheWombat]

@DoomMunky

Weird. DX10 is no problem for once, for me.

Double weird with all those installations every time you start from Steam. That hasn’t happened to me, well, ever.

Yeah, this was very unusual, though the issues with starting from Steam are similar to those I have with Colonization. The shortcuts are zippy but starting within Steam’s game list is pokey.

In its defense, though, DX9 looks pretty similar to the DX10 version as far as I can tell, and the performance is very good.

[Jason_Cross]

@Fugitive

ATI might just need to update their drivers like Nvidia did. DX10 is still so underused that it’s not really fully stabilized yet.

ATI pushed out a Far Cry 2 hotfix (seems more stable than Nvidia’s, from hearsay around the web) several days before the game released. You can grab it here: http://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=894&task=knowledge&questionID=38664

[DoomMunky]

I’m reading on the rest of the internets that you can fix the laggy, floaty mouse feeling by dropping the settings a bit in DX10 or switching to DX9:

@bit-tech.net forums

Originally Posted by MaZ
Well after fighting for a half hour to get the game into DX9 mode without blackscreening me on load, I’ve finally got into game in DX9 mode and it’s frickin perfect .No mouse lag at all, plays beautifully. No pretty DX10 stuff though

Apparently this is all to do with FPS - switching to DX9 gave enough of an FPS boost to clear the input sluggishness - apparently turning the quality down in DX10 has the same effect and also drops mouse stupidity to none.

Now I don’t know much about game engine programming but surely input polling shouldn’t be related to output fps? :/

yep that sorted it for me, dropped settings down from ultra high and very high which was giving me 30-50fps depending on what was happenning
now getting 60fps solid (vsync) and the mouse thing is fixed
annoying because the fps were fine at the higher quality setting :

Dunno if this is an issue for anyone but me (I’ve largely gotten used to it, though), but I thought I’d share. Still nothing on the FOV front.

[rrmorton]

Can anyone suggest what I can do about hitching or stuttering? I’ve got the game running very smoothly at high resolution in DX10 but I’m getting awful hiccups. They don’t seem to happen when I drive either; only on foot, which is strange. But they are frequent and irksome.

Thanks!