Far cry 3 and 7970m

Thanks, I'm able to OC now. Before I spend time on figuring out clocks, has anyone overclocked and know the best stable OC?

 

for me 950/1450 was the highest stable OC, over that i got BSODs, but i think many have gone higher. I must add that i overclock without enabling unofficial option or copying any files, just on stock MSI AB.

 

Happy to help! It took me a couple hours to figure it out myself when I first got my laptop, so I know it can be a pain when you aren't sure where to look.

950/1400 is a safe place to start. If you pay to have it done by one of the resellers, they normally set the clocks around there. You will most likely be able to go much higher (I have done 1050/1550 with no problems whatsoever, others have gone higher) but be careful. Make sure you watch your temps with HWINFO64 and use Kombuster to test for stability. Let the benchmarking begin!

 

failwheeldrive, what settings do you use? I'm running 12.11 beta11 with CAP2 as 12.11Perfromance resulted in constant crashes. Now, I still get black boxes that everyone is but i get horrible stuttering.

 

I use the beta11 with CAP2, and ultra settings with 2xMSAA running in Borderless window mode. It normally runs around 35-45 fps, though it'll drop down to 30 or so in towns unfortunately. No stuttering though, it looks smooth outside of towns. Have you tried changing it from full-screen to borderless? It stops the atidxx32.dll crashes that happen sometimes.

 

no even with that i get horrible micro stuttering. What do you have for the other video settings, like buffered frames and whatnot?

 

Window Mode: Borderless
V-Sync: Off
GPU Max Buffered Frames: 1 (I didn't notice any differences in framerate when changing this)
DirectX: DX11
MSAA: 2
Alpha to Coverage: Standard
SSAO Method: SSAO
FOV: 73.15

Overall Quality: Ultra

If you're still experiencing microstuttering, maybe try lowering some settings? I wish I had an easy solution, but it seems like a lot of people are having framerate issues with this game. Ubisoft is known for sub-standard pc ports unfortunately, although FC3 is definitely better than some of their other games (Assassin's Creed 3 is the worst pc port I've ever played.)

 

Try Fullscreen. It doubled my FPS. With update 1.2 it shouldn't give too much trouble Alt+Tabbing now.

 

It's odd, I don't notice any difference in performance between fullscreen and borderless, though borderless does stop the crashes. Do you mean alt+tabbing to prevent crashing?

 

beanwolf try enabling triple buffer in CCC, it might help with the stuttering. Some issues wont be fixed until the official CCC is released and they patch the game a few times more. Its all just a waiting game.
Has anyone tried running Farcry3 OC'd? I push my 7970m to 1000/1500, very stable.

 

As bad as Enduro is, I won't blame the low frame rates on Enduro. I have a friend who has a desktop setup with three GTX580 in SLI mode. He is getting about 20 something FPS, with certain places going down to single digits. It's the game that sucks, not the card.

 

Im running stock clocks, far cry settings as follows:

MSAA = off
all on ultra except for postfx which is set to medium.
fov 83.6

I don't seem to have this black box thing that every one is complaining about
but I have stuttering, I am getting around 60 fps but the stuttering is so BAD! that it seems as though its lagging any ideas what to do? p.s even on low i get this stuttering,

 

So I just started Far Cry 3. With the performance drivers, I have to run dx11 because oddly, I get the black boxes in dx9 which is the opposite of what everyone in this thread seems to have. Anyway, I get around 30-45FPS. I am getting the occasional stutter though which is irritating. I'll try enabling triple buffering as someone suggested and see if that does anything.

Edit: of course, right when I load the game up again, I'm greeted with black boxes in dx11. Yay!

 

You don't get the black boxes in dx11?! I think you're the first Enduro user I've seen that doesn't get them!

Far Cry 3 runs great on my laptop. I average 45fps outdoors, 60+ indoors, and 35fps in towns. It doesn't stutter on me. Performance is even better when I run overclocked, at 1000/1500 I average 50+fps.

 

Yeah, it was an anomaly. I started it in dx9 because I heard all the problems with the boxes. Got them my first time in dx9. Switched to dx11 and they stopped appearing. Next time I loaded after forcing triple buffering (and 16x AF), I got them again in dx11. Sooooooo I'm going to try (again!) in dx9 to see if they come back. Such a weird problem. That and in most games I've played recently, I've had items not load up graphically, which I'm sure is a driver bug and not the game itself (Far Cry 3 opening, two knives were invisible, armor thing in Red Faction: Armageddon partially disappeared after loading a save, part of an entire map in Crysis 2 didn't load properly, and so on).

 

Even with forcing triple buffering and setting frame render to 3, I still get stuttering. Kinda sucks, because aside from that, it runs at 45-60 FPS with the occasional dips to 25-30.

 

That sucks, it seems like a really common problem :/

Dumb question, but what do you mean by triple buffering? Just setting the gpu maxed buffered frames to 3? If it's something different that's not in the game's menu I'd like to try it.

 

Forced Triple Buffering through the CCC.

Anyway, I managed to mostly make the stuttering go away. This game apparently really hates when the FPS varies even slightly, so I had to cap my FPS at 30.

 

Thanks, I'll check it out.

I have noticed the "stuttering" occurs even in slight fps dips. I still can't stand 30 fps though lol. If there was an option to limit fps to 40 or 45, I'd try it. Probably wouldn't help though since framerates dip below 40 pretty often.

 

You can set the limit to whatever you want, I believe, as long as vsync is off. There's a file in the folder under documents/my games. Open it with notepad and next to the "ShowFPS="0"" you want to add "MaxFPS="*"", where * is whatever you want. I think 30 would work best though since it rarely goes below it.

 

I am getting tired of it crashing all the time. Half the time it crashes from a "runtime error" when taking a screenshot (steam, not in game camera), the other half the time it crashes to desktop while loading after a death or mission fail.

Edit: MSVCR100.dll seems to be the culprit of the crashes. Not sure what to do about that.

 

Hi, I came across this video in youtube:

Far Cry 3 Gameplay on Laptop - 7970M - max. settings - Clevo P170EM - YouTube

And as my laptop was having terrible performance issues with exactly the same driver, I tried the tutorial he posted:

First of all, I never could install the betas without having the stock catalyst already installed. If I uninstalled the stock ones previously, I ended up having loading crashes in CCC.exe.

Then I tried this step by step so I could install this beta without needing the stock ones.

At first, I had a BSOD on boot on step 5. My windows 7 64 bits was always BSODing on boot. Then I entered safe mode again, installed the newest Intels HD Graphics Driver from there and windows booted Ok.
After that I could install the beta 11 and CAP2 on a normal boot.

The results were unbelievable, far cry 3, ultra settings dx11, 8x aa running at a very playable 40-55 fps with almost no stuttering and no black boxes!!!!

Then I lowered Pos FX and AA to 2x and it runs at 50 FPS stable, full screen, till now no crashes whatsoever.

The driver sweeper stuff made all the difference to me.

Can you guys prove this solution works? Before this I was having terrible stuttering and black boxes all over.

Hope I helped someone

DT

 

Yeah, no. Even beast rigs have difficulties running it at 40+ maxed out with 8x AA.

 

Yeah, there's no way a 7970m could handle 8xmsaa at 40-55fps, even ona ridiculous overclock. I get those framerates on 2xmsaa.

 

On Dx9 lol.

 

It worked as is showed on video, strangely it stopped working.
Started crashing, stuttering black boxes all over again. This enduro thing is crazy.

Now I was playing and the power consumption was so high that it lowered the battery to 6% on charging!
Wierd things.

DT

 

No again. If you're plugged in, the battery will not drain as you're using only the power brick. I get the feeling you're more confused than we are with your original statement. Maybe the power went out when you were playing a game or your machine is faulty.

 

Is any one else able to get 50FPS with 8x AA? I don't play the game but it is interesting that the guy in the video is getting such high FPS with maxed AA.

 

Yeah, I also installed the driver in that way and it works, - Before, I struggled with blue screens as well ;-). You just have to install the newest Intel driver from safe-mode. I do not own Far Cry, but I think I got a bit better performance in Red Faction (I get 60 fps almost all the time maxed out, but I also did that with the old driver). Give it a shot if you have problems. It does not hurt to try.
Here is what I did in details:
Uninstall both all AMD-drivers and Intel-drivers.
Boot into safe-mode and use Driversweeeper to clean all the remaining stuff
Install the latest Intel-driver in safe-mode.
Boot normally and install the AMD-driver
Reboot. For me, I had to reboot two times before it worked for some reason.
Now, the latest AMD-driver should work, and you should not get blue screens.

 

Pretty sure it's impossible, even in dx9.

 

This. That video just shows the guy in the menu with everything turned up to max, but my guess is he never applied the settings. There's just no way a 7970m will run 50+fps with full MSAA. I get 30-35fps with x8 (even lower in some areas,) and 40-50 with x2.

 

Unless he was overclocking his 7970M. He mentioned in the information section that the CPU was at stock clocks, but made no mention for the 7970M.

 

Even overclocking I don't see it as possible since desktop 7970s can't even max it out at 50fps.

 

Honestly, unless he has a super magical mega 7970m, I doubt it. I think I have a pretty decent card; I can game at 1075/1550+ with no stability issues, but I wouldn't be able to stay at 50+fps with those settings. FC3 is by far the most demanding game I've played at max settings, aside from The Witcher 2 with ubersampling. There's a good chance he's oced, but I still think he's got MSAA set x2 at the most.

 

Hi,
I found this thread and apparently you're talking about my video
Seriously, the only purpose of this video was to help people having issues with their 7970m and I can assure you that the settings, shown in the video were applied!
I asked myself the question whether dx9 or dx11 was activated, too. However, I took various screenshots which proved that dx11 was definately activated.

Now after I recently installed a new ssd and reinstalled windows I'm having troubles with farcry again. The performance went down by aproximately 10fps when I run at max settings.

Like you guys I really don't get what's wrong with the 7970m ._.*

 

Yeah, exactly what happened to me after I tried your steps. It worked like your video then in another gaming session (not even a reboot later) it stopped working and even the black boxes that had vanished has reappeared.
I even retried reinstalling but couldn't reproduce it again, and now my far cry is back to a horrible stuttering state, even in medium post fx and shadows, even in dx9, and it crashes if its not in borderless mode (dx9 also crashes).

edit: mine lowered way more than 10 fps maxed out, its back to 10-20 fps when it was 40-50.

DT

 

I hate to sound skeptical, but there's just no way a laptop 7970m is going to outperform a desktop gtx 680 or a radeon 7970. The framerates you were getting were literally better than than pretty much every high end desktop gpu (aside from the 690) could pull off with 8xMSAA, and that simply doesn't make sense.

The video you posted never showed you click "apply" when you had the video settings shown; I would make the same video playing in DX9 with no MSAA and say I was running maxed out too. See my point?

 

I'm back to the stock drivers, much smoother gameplay, pratically the only lag is from lower fps values, no terrible stuttering. Let's hope AMD amazes us with a great driver soon.

DT

 

I have followed this thread since... Well, since it was created. Quite honestly I never had issues with Far Cry 3. In fact, I have finished the game with no "black boxes", at least, no visible ones. Aditionally, I have played with DX11 maxed out settings, much like in that youtube video you guys are talking about. Just checked the performance now with Fraps, and it goes from 30 to high 50's with those settings (being mostly in low 40's for most of the gameplay). If you want, I can record a video with my mobile phone in any conditions you want to see, to show I'm not jesting. I understand that this game as been quite a headache for some (Assassin's Creed 3 is still bugging me with random freezes and low FPS), but I haven't found any issues, both with the lates Beta 11 driver and the Performance one.

 

I can easily achieve those framerates with everything maxed and 2xmsaa, but 8xmsaa is extremely demanding, with desktop 680s only getting framerates in the 30s and 40s. If you want to make a video that would be great, but be sure to open the video options and hit "apply" after setting msaa to 8x.

 

Hello everybody!
Wanted to add what I think after testing it this evening.
Having box version (I don't know how is it via Steam), when opening the game folder I can actually choose between farcry3.exe and farcry3_d3d11.exe files. If I go ahead and open farcry3.exe I can choose dx9 or dx11, while opening farcry3_d3d11.exe I get dx11 only with no option to change to dx9.
Now, running the game under farcry3.exe gives me option to set dx11 and apply, and in settings I will have black and white that we are now dx11 (even after restart!); however, the game will still render dx9 regardless.
Since the visual effects of dx9 on ultra and dx11 on ultra are just cosmetic/subtle it got me good couple of screenshots to establish that little difference.
What differs is:
DX9 I got average of 30fps with ultra +msaa2x, enhanced etc. (wonder if that actually applies as it shouldn't under DX9 - need more testing) - no stuttering and no shadow boxes.
DX11 gives me average of 35-40fps on the same settings; with massive stuttering black boxes and overall glitchery feeling to the game.

Below DX11

Below DX9

 

Currently uploading the video (135 MBs) I clicked apply on all graphics settings. The gameplay may seem jerky to you (low light conditions) but fraps will tell you how smooth it is for me. Once the video is done I'll post a link...

 

Okay, just saw this. My shortcut wasn't directed to the DX11 executable. When running through that one, the game would dip into high 10's low 20's for most gameplay. Decreasing MSAA to x2 would make it run into some steady 30 something FPSs. My bad guys. Still, I wasn't able to find any blackboxes. The game's graphics do look smoother though...

 

For what it's worth here is the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPVucR3SrmU

It's the DX9 Executable running with DX11 options on... I can make a DX11 video if anyone whants, but performance is pretty much what I stated in my previous post.

Cheers guys.

 

Thanks for taking the time to upload the video. I really don't know what to say at this point lol, those framerates are much better than anything I get on DX11 and 8xMSAA. They're also better than benchmarks I've seen for the gtx 680, 7970, etc., which are obviously much more powerful than our cards. The only explanation I can think of is that the vast majority of people are having performance issues, while a few aren't. Perhaps driver-related, or maybe something to do with different versions of the game... idk. I'll see how my game performs from the DX9 executable and report back, but I'm pretty sure it'll be the same as I usually get: around 30 fps, sometimes dipping into the 20s, sometimes up to 35 or so.

+rep for the vid

 

I have the steam version and am trying to play through the executable. It launches uplay and says my game isn't registered. Try entering the cd key and it says it's invalid. I launch uplay through steam and try to launch the executable and it says I need to close other versions of uplay.

-_-

 

Holy crap, I figured it out. I have the Steam version too, and I have tried changing to DX9 in the past, but it never worked until now. I reloaded the game after changing the option to DX9, and the game started running off the igpu. I had to go into the ccc and change the farcry3 executable to run off the 7970m, and when I restarted the game I was getting 45+fps on 8xMSAA! No black boxes either! The issue seems to be that Steam users aren't actually playing the DX9 version even when they switch to DX9 in options. It won't load correctly for some reason. When it just ran for me, every issue was solved!

Edit: The reason why framerates are so much better is because MSAA isn't supported in DX9. I don't really care though, because the black boxes are finally freaking gone. I'm so damn excited lol.

 

Okay, I ran it through steam and it seems to work in dx11 at 45+ FPS. This is weird. I'm sure the next time I load it up, I'll get black boxes again. This is how it was the first time I played.

 

Check your event viewer, I bet you're running of the regular Farcry3 executable. When you're running off the farcry3_d3d11 you get the black boxes and crashes in full screen. It makes sense now how some people seem to be running full MSAA and don't have black boxes, they're actually running off the dx9 executable.

 

What other disadvantages are there when running off of the DX9 exe? Are there specific DX11 features like tessellation that no longer work, or are there no real DX11 features in the first place?

Sheldorconqueror, can you update your original post with the new info?