Fix for extremely laggy / stuttering game (WIN 8+)

[Pulse]

TLDR: Search for "Exploit Protection", click on Program Settings, Add a program, select your Far Cry 3 installation directory and go to "bin" (Steamapps/common/Far Cry 3/bin), add farcry3_d3d11 (For the DX11 version, has to be selected in game settings or do this for both exe's) scroll down to "Control Flow Guard", override system settings and turn it "off". Disabling "Data Execution Prevention" (DEP) *may* also help. Try just CFP first.

AND YES. DOING THIS CAN LEAVE YOUR SYSTEM VULNERABLE. DO NOT TURN OFF EITHER SETTING GLOBALLY. APPLY THIS TO INDIVIDUAL EXES FROM TRUSTED SOURCES. YOU STILL ARE TAKING A RISK (with DEP especially.)

So, wanting to revisit Far Cry 3, I found the game to be extremely unplayable. Even if I could get a somewhat stable frame rate, the game would barely reach over 40 FPS on optimal.

Keep in mind, I've got a pretty decent system (at least top 10% of steam gamers), RX 6800 GPU, i7 5820k, 32GB of DDR4 ram. I was expecting to play the game on ultra 100+ FPS no problems. Boy I was in for a surprise.

I felt cheated (I mean whats the point of a 1000+ dollar GPU upgrade if the game runs WORSE than my 6 year old EVGA 970??) and most information online chocked it up to poor driver support and optimizations. They're wrong (At least from what I've experienced.)

As I said in the TLDR, Disabling Control Flow Guard fixes all stuttering and lag issues for me. I've got over 100+ FPS stable with no micro-stuttering on Ultra.

As for Data Security? I've yet had someone truly explain (In lemming terms) what CFP *does*. All I know? It's important to an extent, and is another layer of Windows "Defense In Depth" (Its a bit more than just a simple AV system, it protects deeper than that). How exposed does turning off CFP and / or DEP leave you? Some say the attacker would have to still have an access point to affect your system, others say textures can hold hidden malicious code that'll be executed and your computer WILL implode.

Personally? I've made multiple games run 100x better with CFP turned off. Unreal games *especially.* We're talking insane performance increases in *multiple titles*. It's clearly not cache / RAM cleaning after an exe reset. My computer hasn't imploded, though I also don't keep my credit card information stored anywhere on my PC or in online retailers. I'm fairly sure as long as you don't disable it globally, you'll be fine.

I hope this helps any fellow players to be able to get back into FC3 and enjoy a game from our past that was *supposedly* locked away from enjoyable gameplay due to it being "unoptimized."

[Schissbirne]

Thank you so much! Of all the things I found about this game and its bad performance, this is the only thing that did anything. It is not perfect but it is much smoother to play now. And I have a system that can run any RTX game well. :D I also remember playing this game years ago with a not even high end system for the time and it was buttery smooth. (I have Win 11 and a GTX 4070 super)