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The PC version of Far Cry 6 sometimes looks like it fell out of the future. It’s enhanced with hardware accelerated ray tracing for both reflections and shadows on supported hardware, and there are moments where it looks much better than a multiplatform game from two years ago has any right to.
But then you’ll turn a corner and see an awkward asset, or a weird animation, or some indirect lighting that’s gray and indistinct. Or you’ll notice that its urban areas are largely bereft of people. Or you’ll realize that its world is rather bland outside of the scripted missions.
It’s not easy to target multiple generations of hardware with a single game — but Far Cry 6 looks like it was built for the PS4 first and then scaled up from there. The newer PS5 and Xbox Series consoles don’t get any of the PC’s ray tracing goodness, instead just running the older console version at higher resolutions and frame rates. The PC also has a gargantuan 60 gigabyte HD texture pack that it claims requires a GPU with at least 11 gigs of VRAM — though turning it on only added about a gig and a half to the load monitor in the game’s options menu, pushing me up to about 8 gigs usage at max settings. And unless you zoom in with photo mode, you may not see the difference…
