Far Cry 5 is just a few weeks away and we finally had the opportunity to get our hands on the PC version. It looks amazing, but more important to most players will be how many buttons and gears they can tinker with to optimize it for their system. While we're still waiting on code to see how Far Cry 5 runs, we can at least eyeball the graphics settings and display options until then. Keep in mind that this is a preview build, so what you see is subject to change.
The expected display options are present with the welcome addition of the menu display option, which you can enable to shunt some UI elements off to another monitor entirely. I'm a big fan of the VRAM meter too, a recent trend that helps visualize what your PC might be capable of.
The environment detail options are about what I expected, broken down by the usual categories for an open world game set in a wilder environment. Anti-aliasing options are limited to SMAA and TAA, though the latter isn't supported by multi-GPU setups.
I dig the addition of brightness and contrast adjustment meters alongside the usual gamma scale. A colorblind mode is available too, though we won't know how expansive or effective the setting is until Far Cry 5 is out in the wild.
The blessed FOV scaler is there, and it goes pretty high too. I like a nice 90, which sits at the halfway point on the scale. Those that prefer fisheyed views should be happy here. Good news for framerate diehards: it's not locked unless you want it to be. For anyone aiming to get a steady 60 at 4K, it's a welcome feature, but if you like your framerates unimpinged, then there's nothing to worry about here. Resolution scaling is there too, a feature that adjusts the rendered resolution independent of the display resolution. If you want to run Far Cry 5 on a 4K display but can't quite juice it, you can scale down the resolution until things flow smoothly. And if you're rolling with a trusty 1920x1080 display but want to sharpen the jaggies, bumping up the resolution scaling should provide a sharper image (at a performance cost, of course).
None of this matters too much if Far Cry 5 doesn't run well, but I don't expect major issues. Previous Far Cry games haven't been a nightmare on PC in my experience, though that may not be the case for everyone. We'll be sure to run it through the benchmark ringer when it's released on March 27.
VIDEO: 30 minutes of Far Cry 5 singleplayer running on PC, also available on YouTube.
