GTX 960

[Omega+]

How will a 960 work if I set the game to either very high or high but keep hair/fur off and AA toSMAA?

[Category Theory]

Should work great. The main GPU-killers are MSAA (I use 2x), fur simulation and similar, and God Rays (which just seems to blow up some people regardless of how powerful their GPU is). I can easily maintain 70-80 FPS almost everywhere with just that stuff turned off or down on my 970, so I'd imagine that if you're willing to pull back a little more, a 960 should get you to 60 FPS most of the time.

[Omega+]

Yesh. I'm not super picky about graphics or fps but my monitor starts acting all laggy with 48 or lower fps. 50 is usually minimum for me. So, with MSAA no hair or fur, maybe high shadows but very thing else very high/ultra should be OK?

[Omega+]

Also, is this better opti,ized then FC3? Because I find that game has wild frame rates. Everthing from 33 to 200 fps on high settings. Sometimes I go to an area and get 45 fps, I turn around, walk back and get 60 in the same spot. Is FC4 better then that?

[Category Theory]

Running at 1080p I didn't find the aliasing to be much of a problem at all, so I'd try going with MSAA off at first, and see how it looks. If aliasing gets bothersome, you can bump MSAA up to 2x. Yeah, definitely leave hair simulation and the like off, and put everything else up to ultra and take things down bit by bit from there.

Remember that frame rate can also be greatly affected by CPU: it doesn't matter how good your graphics card is if your CPU can't model the world fast enough to create the frame information it sends to the graphics card to be rendered. That said, even when I was running on a Core i5, it seemed fine. (I use an oldish i7 now, and CPU doesn't seem to be an issue.)

I've not noticed, in FC3 or FC4, the random frame rate drops you've been seeing; large frame rate changes in the same area for me have always been due to "oh, now there's a huge pile of enemies here." It's quite normal to see large frame rate increases here and there, though, when you've not capped it or turned on vsync and you happen to be in an area that's easy to remember. That's nothing to worry about; the main aim is to try to configure things so that your minimum frame rate stays at 60 or thereabouts even when things get busy.

[Omega+]

Great! Thanks for all your help! BTW, i hsve an I&4700MQ so it should be ok

[-=SOF=-WID99]

in case it helps i use an ASUS Strix GTX 960 \ 2 gig card

CPU = an old core 2 quad Q9650 \ 12 meg cache CPU

my in Game settings are Custom
resolution 1920 X 1080
vsync - on

Quality settings
motion blur off - not a fan of it ..
Textures - Ultra
Shadows - High
Post FX -Ultra
Geometry - Very High
Vegetation- Ultra
Environment - High
Water - Ultra
Ambient Occusion setting is SSBC
Antialising settings is SMAA

God rays - off- not a fan of how it looks (can make the game unstable)
Fur - on (not nvidia fur)
Trees relief -on

in Advanced settings
Triple buffering - off
Vsync mode - Normal

in Nvidia control panel, i made these changes
Anisotropic Filtering = 16 X
Max Pre Rendered Frames = 1
Set Power Management Mode = Adaptive

game looks fine to me and plays stutter free on my system with zero crashes

also i installed Razer Cortex version 7.0 as it does seem to help with this game
http://www.filehorse.com/download-game-booster/old-versions/

the new version of Cortex .. does not seem to work so well for boosting the FPS in FarCry 3 and 4

but 7.0 works well

[-=SOF=-WID99]

also if you have a laptop the 960 M is ALOT slower then the desktop version of the GTX 960

so you may be stuck with lower settings (like Medium) ..so keep that in mind ..laptop GPU's are always slower then a desktop GPU .. they run at lower clock speeds to conserve on power and heat generated by the GPU the ....960 m also has fewer shader units

as well as lower clock speed for both the GPU chip and memory as well as lower memory bandwidth

here is the 960 M version
http://www.geforce.com/hardware/notebook-gpus/geforce-gtx-960m/specifications

here is the desktop version of a GTX 960

http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-960/specifications


if ya have a laptop version of the 960 see this page ..far cry 4 is bench marked
so you know what to expect on your M version

http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-960M.138006.0.html

[Omega+]

May I ask what sort of frame rates you get with those settings?

[-=SOF=-WID99]

50 to 60 most of the time i have seen it seen it hit 80's ... but some area's yes it dips to the mid 40s

more on how a GTX 960 can perform with Far Cry 4 .. they benched my card here last year
they did use lower settings but left god rays on... so they got slightly lower results .. the game didnt crash with older drivers ..

with new drivers, Nvidia godrays will cause the game to crash ..and i have seen people have the same problem on titan X's as well as 980 ti cards

as well as since patch 1.8.0 Nvidia soft shadows will kill your fps , but that was busted when the game launched and it took lots of patches
(SLI had bad shadow problems from what i remember reading )


here is the review of my card and FC 4
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2015/03/23/asus_strix_gtx_960_directcu_ii_oc_video_card_review/4#.VpPpwBUrIdU


..i keep my Strix 960 in overclock mode and never had an issue with heat
and only use drivers from the ASUS website

right now i have version 359.06 in from Decmeber 2015 and have no problems with any of my other games
(thats the last driver Asus posted for the Strix GTX 960 cards)

its a larger file size then the Nvidia version of the same driver and the funny part is ASUS posted that driver in Febuary 2016 = 464.72 MByte 2016/02/15

https://www.asus.com/us/Graphics-Cards/STRIXGTX960DC2OC2GD5/HelpDesk_Download/

nvidia's version of the same driver is from december 2015 and smaller ?

http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/96079/en-us

Version: 359.06 WHQL
Release Date: 2015.12.1
Operating System: Windows 10 64-bit
Language: English (US)
File Size: 303.75 MB

so it may be ASUS tweaked the drivers for my GPU ?
since it is a factory overclocked card ?

[-=SOF=-WID99]

but again your not gonna see the same performance if you have a laptop GTX 960 M ..they are much slower

as i pointed out in my above post the GTX 960 m has
less shader units (cuda cores)
less memory bandwidth
and a much lower memory clock speed

then a desktop version of a GTX 960

but you should be fine with Medium settings .... i would think??

and the game does not look that bad on medium textures
(thats what i used back when i had my AMD R 9 270 X in mix of medium to high settings )

just lower your resolution to 720 P may help a bit too (1280X720 )