Unless you’ve got some serious power though, expect a console-style 30fps in payment for such fidelity.ĭropping down a notch to ‘very high’ puts 60fps in your reach, but don’t expect to hit that in the game’s busiest and biggest environments. You can see it’s a heavily detailed game, with great texture work and lots of dense foliage. This sees every setting in the graphics menu cranked all the way up, with SMAA anti-aliasing. Let’s have a look at Primal on its best form, at ‘ultra’ settings. If you’re happy to deal with the odd bit of screen tearing here and there, it’s best to avoid V-sync if you’re looking to hit the highest fps (Primal does not cap or lock your frames).
‘Normal’ will lock the frame rate to your monitor refresh rate as expected (so in my case 60), while ‘sparse’ sets it to half, resulting in a lock at 30fps. On the same menu you’ll also find an interesting setting for V-synch that adjusts between ‘normal’ and ‘sparse’ mode. You’ll find configuration options for environmental elements such as geometry, water, and volumetric fog, and the ability to turn off the divisive motion-blur effect.Īnti-aliasing options are just about there, but there’s simply the choice between SMAA and FXAA, rather than the x4/x8 style breakdowns.Ī field of view slider is present and correct but naturally defaults to a low setting, so be sure to visit that page early on to crank it up a little/lot. In the graphics settings menu, there’s a set of adjustable elements that, while fairly standard, are thankfully robust. Dial down the anti-aliasing settings to FXAA on ‘ultra’ though, and you’ll see a notable improvement that keeps you in the 60s much more frequently. The highest ‘ultra’ settings are also within grasp, but you’ll be playing at frame rates that range between 30 and 40, as opposed to the largely solid 60 that ‘very high’ offers. While the game certainly looks nice at the third-highest pre-set, if your rig is similar to mine you’ll find that you can notch up to ‘very high’ and suffer no notable performance drop. The game auto-configures based on detected hardware, and for my rig that defaults to ‘high’ settings. Aside from some very minimal pop-in, the largest environments in Primal look gorgeous: not quite enough to steal your breath in this age of Rise of the Tomb Raider and The Witcher 3, but enough to make you pause. These range from the more obvious Stone Age-looking barren wastes with leafless trees, to huge valleys lush with fauna and flowing waters. As you’d expect from a Far Cry title, it’s a game with massive, beautiful settings.