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https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2021-far-cry-6-tech-review
Far Cry 6 tech review: it looks good and runs well - but needs extra polish
PC, PS5 and Xbox Series consoles tested.
The venerable Dunia engine returns once again for the sixth mainline entry in the Far Cry franchise - and there's a certain sense of a series returning to its roots. Firstly, the latest open world evokes the more lush, jungle terrain of earlier games, while there's also the return of technologies like fire propagation - its omission much lamented in Far Cry 5. While gameplay hasn't progressed significantly, there are a range of new graphics features, along with ray tracing on PC and a focus on 60 frames per second on the latest generation of consoles - but also the sense that the game requires further polish to make it everything it can be.
Perhaps this is the Dunia Engine's last stand, but there's no doubt that Far Cry 6 is still a handsome game and some of the new additions to the engine are striking. For example, the skies are considerably more impressive than prior games thanks to the inclusion of a ray-marched volumetric cloud rendering system. Similar technologies have been seen in Horizon Zero Dawn and Microsoft Flight Simulator to name just two, but the clouds do look good in Far Cry 6, particularly in how they interact with lighting, especially during sunset. There are limitations though, with their low resolution breaking down into noise with fast movement at 60fps.
Less dramatic but still impressive is water deformation, best highlighted when marine wildlife interacts with the surface - but one element of the game I was really looking forward to was the introduction of hardware-accelerated ray tracing features. Unfortunately, this is PC-only, but regardless, there are two key effects here: shadows and reflections. How much they add to the presentation depends on the effect. Honestly, ray traced shadows are a bit of a question mark in their effectiveness, because first of all they only apply to sun shadows - so all indoor and artificial shadows are standard shadow maps. Also, shadows cast by vegetation or alpha-masked transparencies are also just shadows maps mixed into the RT equivalents. Another negative aspect is the fact that RT shadows - along with much of the post-process pipelines - run at quarter resolution. RT shadows are a net gain overall, but the implementation could be much better and the effect is too limited overall.
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So how does the game fare on consoles? Series S seems to spend most of its time in the 1080p-1224p range and while you get 60 frames per second, the presentation is not hugely attractive. The general blurriness in the presentation means that hammering down pixel counts for PS5 and Series X is challenging but PlayStation 5 renders in the 1728p to 1872p range, while the Microsoft flagship has a higher resolution window, seemingly in the 1872p to full 2160p range.
The real-life implication of this is simply that you get a crisper image on the high-end Xbox console.
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