FarCry 4 Performance on ROG G771JM And G551JM (GTX 860M) Gaming Notebooks

As far as open-world shooter-romps go, you'll be hard-pressed to find better than the FarCry series. FarCry 4 now takes fans to the fictional Himalayan country called Kyrat, where you return from the United States to promptly get wrapped up in a civil war between the rebellious local resistance, called the Golden Path, and tyrannical militia-leader, Pagan Min.

Those who played the previous FarCry will instantly recognize some familiar tropes in the collection of fauna and flora that'll make you an expert in botany and 'arts & crafts', whilst the generous array of weapons, secondary attacks, skills and upgrades plucks the strings of RPG as much as FPS. Where FarCry 2 and 3 had you jumping in cars, boats and quads, FarCry 4 has you strapping on a wing-suit to glide over valleys, or hopping on an elephant to go rampaging. Bring it on!

With Nvidia's help, the Dunia 2 engine has been updated with the latest DirectX 11 effects - including Volumetric Fog, TXAA, HBAO+, Soft Shaders and Tree and Fur enhancements. There's even an "Nvidia" graphics setting over-and-above the Ultra for those with the most serious gaming PCs; it truly is a PC-gamers game.

FarCry4 Performance: Best Playable Settings

The G771JM and G551JM are ROG's 'mainstream' 17-inch and 15-inch gaming laptops respectively, both feature up to a quad-core Intel Core i7 4710HQ processor, 16GB of DDR3 and Nvidia GTX 860M graphics.

Here's the best playable gameplay settings for these gaming notebooks in FarCry 4.

G771JM & G551JM tested spec:

• Intel Core i7 4710HQ processor
• 16GB 1600MHz DDR3 (2x8GB)
• Nvidia GTX 860M graphics card (Maxwell: 640 cores)
• 256GB PCIe SSD option
• Full HD (1920 x 1080) IPS display
• [ROG Gladius gaming mouse]
• Nvidia GeForce driver: 344.65 WHQL
• Intel HD Graphics driver: 10.18.10.3910 WHQL
• Windows 8.1 Pro

Before we started we tested out all the settings to see their real effects on game-play. In all cases we recommend disabling motion blur, as while this adds to the cinematic effect, it detracts from target accuracy in fast game-play and can sometimes induce motion-sickness in some players. Disabling all mouse acceleration is also a key component of target accuracy; this can be done from the Keyboard & Mouse options. We also recommend trying to increase the Field of View (FoV) under Video, Advanced Settings, to find a comfortable player setting.

As you can see in the results above, the most significant performance gain was dropping the resolution slightly; from 1920 x 1080 to 1600 x 900, which gave us 'low' FPS numbers, but with a significant graphical upgrade. This is the best playable settings:

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Ambient Occlusion makes a huge difference to the visual quality despite a relatively big hit to performance, and we recommend running SSBC settings, which is Ubisoft's version of SSAO that looks slightly better, but without the performance hit of HABO+ for this level of hardware. Combined with Shadows and PostFX at medium to offset a few extra FPS without a noticeable difference. As you're almost constantly running and fighting among foliage having the Trees relief, Vegetation and Environment all at 'High' greatly benefits the feeling of the gameplay. With 4GB of GDDR5 memory there is plenty to use gameplay at these display resolutions.

Here's a comparison of the Ambient Occlusion settings (Left to right: No AO, SSBC, HBAO+)

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For a more in-depth analysis and comparatives, see the FarCry 4 performance and tweaking guide at GeForce.com