Debunking the legend surrounding playing Far Cry 5 smoothly, devoid of pauses.
Debunking the legend surrounding playing Far Cry 5 smoothly, devoid of pauses.
Hi everyone,
To this day I have still not been able to run Far Cry 5 smoothly without some very annoying stutter, nor the DLC/spinoffs from it including New Dawn. Not only this I can include Far Cry 4 in this matter as well. For the record Far Cry Primal for whatever reason ran very smoothly - both on my old and current PC.
Previously I was running an 17-3770k and a GTX 970 and it did me well for a good number of years. Since then I have upgraded and currently my specs are as follows:
OS: Windows 10 Pro
MAINBOARD: Gigabyte Aorus Z390 Elite
CPU: i5 9600k OC @ 4.6ghz all cores
RAM: 32GB G-Skill Ripjaw @ 3200 mhz Dual channel
VIDEO CARD: Gigabyte Windforce RTX 2080
MOUSE: Logitech gaming 300s
MONITOR: AOC G2460PG G-Sync
HDD: Samsung Evo 850 Pro
Even with this setup, which is not top of the line but respectable, really should be able to run this game with excellent results. And that’s true if I only consider fps as my main measure. But it’s the constant little stutters that never cease in this game that just down right ruin the experience and has made me not want to play still 2 years after its release.
Now however I’m in a position where I am seriously thinking of handing this PC off to family and starting from scratch building a new PC. Not solely for Far Cry 5 but definitely want to build it having it in mind as one of the first games I want to play and finish without all that horrible stutter.
The stutter in question has been well documented in many, many forums online and video upon video on Youtube documenting the issue. To summarize the stutter I experience is as follows:
stutter when collecting item and materials from the world and arrows shot from yourself and picking them up again.
stutter when autosaving – the game has a very aggressive autosave feature. Each time the game autosaves you can see 3 small dots in the top right of the screen flash a couple times.
Other stutters just happening at random.
Actually 1 and 2 are the same stutter because when NOT in a mission but just free roam, when each and every single item are collected from the world the game is making an autosave hence the stutter – this is exacerbated when items are grouped together and picking up 5-6 items all in a second or so the game becomes a stuttery mess.
Interestingly, when you are in a mission, the game does not autosave and when picking up items. The stutter from collecting items does not manifest, at least from what I have tried just recently when starting a new game and completing the first several objectives on the tiny island before the rest of the map is opened to the player. I tested this by collecting materials placed in the world as well as shooting arrows at the ground and collecting them again. No stutter.
Now. From my own research I have found there may be some hardware solutions that may be able to brute force the issue with superior hardware. As the below video from Gamer Nexus concludes, CPU’s with 6 or less cores/threads have a lot of trouble running the game without demonstrating stutter. With my current CPU being the 9600k as being reviewed in this video and benchmarked with Far Cry 5, I can reproduce the stutter at will that they had experienced and demonstrated in their video.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F92byoMgptU&t=4s
Secondly, because of the nature of the stutter, primarily being that it occurs when the game is autosaving, has made me think there is a problem when reading/writing to the hard drive. Really though with the game being installed currently on my SSD, I can’t in my right mind say this can be a cause for the stutter. But we can only guess, maybe the code for autosaving has been written poorly - not optimized and so on. I would really like to know if someone has run this game on an NVMe drive and how the game performed.
I have also heard which makes sense - that because the autosave is so aggressive, meaning the game is constantly auto saving as statistics are constantly being tracked and uploaded to Ubisoft servers so they can make infographics. Statistics such as arrows shot, number of people being saved, animals skinned and so on etc.. So because all this is constantly being uploaded to Ubi servers makes sense for stutters like this to occur.
Lastly, I was watching another video today from Digital foundry, (video below @ 3:40) and there was a comment that the game is quite memory bandwidth bound, and any video card that has a 256bit memory bus configuration (including my previous GTX 970 and current RTX 2080) simply can’t handle the game’s needs efficiently. Now of course their video was about running the game at 4k 60fps and I am simply trying to run the game at 1080p, but non the less it has me thinking.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuoZqb6BDc4
I would like to make a call for anyone out there still playing or have Far Cry 5 or its related games, installed on their PC and who were honestly able to play the game without the stutter, upload a small 3-5 minute 60fps video showing the frametime graph on screen. Showing the frametime graph is crucial as Youtube for example is not the best for smooth video playback recorded at 60fps so, the frametime graph makes spikes much easier to detect.
I really want to be proven wrong, that it is possible to run the game without these stutters. Whether the problem lies in not having enough CPU cores/threads, or a video card with a high memory bus configuration (384bit) I want to hear from all and anyone who has honestly had a better result then I ever did. All are most welcome to reply, but I’ll only consider those who have the video evidence to prove it.
Thank you all for reading.
I’ve spent over two decades immersed in gaming, accumulating significant knowledge. Specifically, *Far Cry 5* has consistently presented this issue, and it seems to be unfixable. The problem stems from the game’s automatic saving mechanism, not your hardware – it's a built-in system flaw. Perhaps if storage input/output access latency were equivalent to RAM speed, things might improve. Ultimately, it’s a fundamental design oversight.
I’m uncertain if this information will be useful, considering this conversation has grown quite extensive, but I consistently play *Far Cry 5* and *Far Cry New Dawn* without experiencing any performance issues—no slowdowns or freezes—on my computer. I typically run both games at 1440p resolution with nearly all settings set to maximum. I’ve adjusted a few settings to medium levels.
Below are my system details:
Intel i5-9600K (running at a base clock speed of 4.4 GHz with an EVO 212 RGB Black cooler)
16GB G-Skill Trident 3600 MHz RAM with a latency of CL 16
Nvidia 2060 Super Founders Edition graphics card
Boot drive: A 480GB NVMe Solid State Drive (PCIe 3x4)
Steam drive: A 6TB 5400 RPM Western Digital (with Optane acceleration). *Note: I chose this particular 5400 RPM drive specifically because it would be paired with Optane memory for enhanced performance.* I consistently achieve read speeds of 1383MBps (sequential) and 1242 MBps (random), along with write speeds of 274MBps (sequential and random).
I installed *Far Cry* on the NVMe drive to decrease loading and saving times, and it appears to have noticeably improved performance. While I recognize this is based on personal experience and lacks formal testing data, it does seem to make a positive difference.
Also, I selected the i5-9600K processor over the 8700 or 9600k models due to price differences—the 9600k was $150 cheaper—and the 9600k was difficult to locate and typically more expensive when available. I’ve considered overclocking, but the marginal improvement of 5% in frame rate with a 10-degree temperature increase isn't appealing to me, given that my monitor’s refresh rate is 60Hz.
The action decelerates noticeably when I discover a survivalist’s hidden supply, yet I haven't observed any hesitations during simple magazine retrieval. Even if there were, I doubt it’s connected to the processor. My belief is that it's simply the game automatically preserving its state, and likely more linked to how quickly data can be accessed from storage.
However, I wouldn’t consider a brief delay while acquiring an advantage as a significant disruption—it hardly impacts crucial gameplay. Considering my extensive history with gaming – over three decades – a minor pause during a save operation is not concerning to me in any way. It would be preferable if it didn’t occur, but it likely represents only a fraction of a second and doesn't cause any inconvenience—at all.
To be clear, a user on Reddit reported resolving the problem by adjusting Windows performance options.
Here’s what they wrote: “Hey everyone, I finally got it resolved for me. My Notebook Odyssey with a GTX 1060 and an i7-8750H, running 16GB of RAM, was experiencing stutters and slowdowns. Despite having decent hardware, I began investigating. Disabling all privacy settings within Windows significantly improved things. However, it still stuttered and dropped frames. Ultimately, enabling ‘Ultimate Performance Mode’ in Windows fixed the issue completely. This required entering a command in Command Prompt to activate it. Now, I'm enjoying consistent, smooth gameplay after months of troubleshooting this problem. If you have high-end PCs or laptops struggling with slowdowns and stutters, this might help—you’re welcome!”