Far Cry 6 will get the AMD ray tracing treatment plus optimizations (pcinvasion.com) MD just launched its lineup of RDNA 2-based Radeon RX 6000 GPUs, but it also initiated its campaign to become a prominent force in the graphics market once again. Ray tracing makes most of the headlines these days, as many in the games industry are convinced that it’s the next step in visual fidelity. Nvidia has marketed its RTX technology for a couple of years now, with mixed success. However, the release of RDNA 2 and the arrival of Vulkan ray tracing to compete alongside DirectX 12 Ultimate means it’s really only a matter of time before the technology becomes standard for AAA games. To the point, many AAA games are now implementing ray tracing and Ubisoft has partnered up with AMD to optimize it for
Far Cry 6.
Just like those Nike ads with the jingle “Anything you can do, I can do better,” AMD wants to prove that it’s RDNA 2 architecture can produce mesmerizing lighting effects. More importantly, it wants to show that it’s a mainstream option and no longer just the “other company that makes GPUs.” Partnerships with top game developers like Ubisoft are certainly one way to send the message. It also sounds like
Far Cry 6 might run better on AMD’s tech than Nvidia’s in this case.
AMD released a Partner Showcase video on YouTube today which featured senior
Far Cry 6 developer Oleksandr Polishchuk. As one might expect in a partner content showcase, he spoke of the many
fantastic ways the
Far Cry 6 team has taken advantage of AMD-exclusive software to create a technologically impressive game. There are a lot of buzz words and specific technologies thrown around, but a few stand out.
There’s FideltyFX Contrast Adaptive Sharpening, Hybrid SSR, Ray Tracing, Variable Rate Shading, and the list goes on. Polishchuk also mentioned the popular Smart Access Memory (SAM) feature, which is something gamers can unlock on AMD PC systems. The (currently) exclusive feature boosts game performance by an additional 3-11%, so it will be interesting to see where
Far Cry 6 falls in that range. Given the special partnership between AMD and Ubisoft, it might just be an impressive implementation of SAM. Throw on that lackluster Rage Mode option while you’re at it for maximum performance.
As for the ray tracing , it looks really excellent in the teased images. You can watch the full video of the showcase to see how the raindrops reflect in pools of water. It’s very satisfying. One key takeaway from this showcase though is the promise that AMD 6000 Series GPUs will be able perform smooth 4K ray tracing for
Far Cry 6. That’s huge for AMD and also a great incentive for
Far Cry fans to give the latest entry in the franchise a try.
Games which are designed to favor one architecture over another are nothing new. There are already plenty of games out there that run better on either Nvidia or AMD GPUs.
Godfall is one of the most recent examples, so it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise if we see similar results with
Far Cry 6.
Far Cry 6 is expected to release on May 26, 2021 according to the Microsoft Store listing. You can learn more about it on the
official website.
I'm interested to see what optimizations have been added to the game.