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By Hawaii Beach
System Requirements
Minimum
CPU: Intel Core i5-2400 3.1 GHz or AMD FX-6300 3.5 GHz
RAM: 8 GB
HDD: 40 GB
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 670 or AMD Radeon R9 270 (2 GB of VRAM)
OS: Windows 7 SP1 (64-bit)
Recommended
CPU: Intel Core i7-4770 3.4 GHz or AMD Ryzen 5 1600 3.2 GHz
RAM: 16 GB
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 or AMD Radeon R9 390
OS: Windows 8.1, Windows 10
Editor's System
CPU: Intel Core i5-4690K 4.0GHz
RAM: 16 GB 1600MHz
SSD: Samsung 850 EVO 250 GB
GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 970 SSC
OS: Windows 10 (Version 1709) (64-bit)
I have tested a GTX 760 which barely hit 35 FPS on average in the lowest settings at 1080p. All the tests have been run in 1440p with the specs listed above, and using version 1.2.0. Interestingly, the Uplay client is smart enough to notify you if you are running an outdated version of your GPU drivers, which led me to install the latest game ready drivers (391.35). All the analysis comparison FPS images were conducted with the built-in benchmark, and run twice to ensure that the results are consistent. All settings have been set to Low when comparing the levels of a graphical setting.
Graphics settings
The graphical settings have been cut down to a scarce few options. Features like FXAA, Nvidia's fur textures (HairWorks) and ambient occlusion that were found in previous Far Cry titles are nowhere to be found since Far Cry Primal. Something else I quickly noticed is that the, sometimes distracting, sun glare cannot be disabled. While it is not as bad as Battlefield 3, it certainly catches my attention when trying to look around. Hopefully Ubisoft adds the possibility to disable it with a future patch.
Unlike Far Cry 4 getting changeable FOV support in a day-1 patch, Far Cry 5 features a FOV slider on launch. Though it can be tricky to locate with the option being found under Advanced settings as opposed to something more distinguishable.
Like a few other modern titles restarting the game to apply new graphics settings is a thing of the past. They are applied directly without interrupting your gameplay. I have also noticed how it does not prompt you to save your changes in the Video settings, which for me is a nice gesture as wading through layers of menus can become tedious.
Performance analysis
In this section we are going to look at how each effect impacts frame rate and how each setting changes the visual style of the game. Be sure to check full resolution uncompressed PNGs if you are looking for pixel by pixel detail.
Graphical Presets
The game has four presets, which saves delving into the meat of the options if you wish not to. For some reason this time no preset enables Anti-aliasing. According to the tool-tip available in the options menu, people running the recommend specs listed above should be able to use the High preset on 1080p, but your case may vary.
Texture Filtering
This option controls texture filtering which I suspect uses Anisotropic filtering, the game does not specify the amount of samples, but since it is four options I suspect it ranges from 4x to 16x samples, though this is only an educated guess. Since it does not cause any performance hits on modern processors (see analysis below) I recommend turning it to at least High settings.
Click on the Image to Move the Slider
[compimg]https://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_133/med_gallery_2284_133_906509.jpg|https://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_133/med_gallery_2284_133_177395.jpg|864|540|Low|Ultra[/compimg]
Shadows
The shadows quality can be controlled. While I have not seen noticeable improvement between High and Ultra settings, the difference between Medium and Low is easy to spot. I would recommend setting the shadows to at least Medium to avoid dots illustrating shadows. We could also use a draw distance slider as you can in some instances notice the shadows loading in as you move around, sure the draw distance is improved with each level, especially comparing Low to Ultra; but an independent option to control it would go a long way.
Click on the Image to Move the Slider
[compimg]https://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_133/med_gallery_2284_133_853582.jpg|https://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_133/med_gallery_2284_133_1228487.jpg|864|540|Low|Ultra[/compimg]
Low settings, as you can imagine, does not do the game any justice in the visual fidelity department. I would advise setting it to at least Medium to eliminate most of the square-looking shadows.
[compimg]https://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_133/med_gallery_2284_133_14558.jpg|https://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_133/med_gallery_2284_133_106673.jpg|864|540|Low|Ultra[/compimg]
Geometry & Vegetation
According to the tool tips in the options menu: adjust the graphical complexity of the world geometry and vegetation. But the truth is that this setting controls the draw distance, running on Low settings reveals the noticeable pop-in of many objects. I recommend setting this to at least Medium to minimize the pop-in textures.
Click on the Image to Move the Slider
[compimg]https://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_133/med_gallery_2284_133_40553.jpg|https://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_133/med_gallery_2284_133_66441.jpg|864|540|Low|Ultra[/compimg]
Environment
Since this setting controls the water texture and the separate Water graphical setting does not appear to make a noticeable difference we will be covering it here as well. Setting the option to Medium enables the awe-inspiring reflections in water, but not without cost in the form of a performance hit - see the graphs below.
Click on the Image to Move the Slider
[compimg]https://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_133/med_gallery_2284_133_524249.jpg|https://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_133/med_gallery_2284_133_391076.jpg|864|540|Low|Ultra[/compimg]
Terrain
This setting improves the texture fidelity of the terrain you are close to and extends the draw distance for the terrain. The Low setting shows a lot of blurry terrain after a couple of meters, so switching it over to at least Medium makes the terrain more defined.
Click on the Image to Move the Slider
[compimg]https://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_133/med_gallery_2284_133_1043537.jpg|https://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_133/med_gallery_2284_133_1055492.jpg|864|540|Low|Ultra[/compimg]
Volumetric Fog
This setting does not control the amount of fog, it controls the lightning effects being casted from the environment (including trees, etc). The name of the graphics setting could be misleading, the tool-tip in the options menu does not seem to explain this option properly and the comparison images does not show the real effect of the graphical setting.
Click on the Image to Move the Slider
[compimg]https://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_133/med_gallery_2284_133_291913.jpg|https://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_133/med_gallery_2284_133_788460.jpg|864|540|70 degrees|95 degrees[/compimg]
Field of View
The game features a FOV slider, like every other game Ubisoft have released in the past years. Increasing the FOV from 70 to 95 degrees horizontal (personal preference) will result in a minor FPS drop, roughly about ~5 FPS in my case.
Click on the Image to Move the Slider
[compimg]https://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_133/med_gallery_2284_133_531641.jpg|https://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_133/med_gallery_2284_133_1105215.jpg|864|540|70 degrees|95 degrees[/compimg]
Anti-aliasing
For AA options we only have SMAA and TAA available, with only 1x sampling. In comparison to older titles it feels like we are lacking some options with Ubisoft's latest addition to the series. Enabling any AA only shaved off a couple of FPS at Low settings, but will always depend on your location.
The comparison below is not shown in the source quality. See the original image as it's easier to spot the difference on each AA level. If you want AA enabled I would recommend SMAA as it provides the best quality and the least performance hit.
Controls
There are separate sensitivity sliders for different usages, which is a bonus. Mouse Acceleration is disabled by default, and I have had an smooth experience not experiencing any mouse lag. The key binding is disappointing since you only can assign an action to one key. There is a preview image of the keys assigned, but since I have a Swedish keyboard these binds do not match, neither do the extra letters we have in the language match up, which shows that there could be improvements done.
Audio
The audio settings are underwhelming due to a lack of independant sliders for music, sfx and voice. They are all mixed into one volume slider, except VoIP which has its own separate slider.
Conclusion
So conclusion time! The draw distance for each level of all the graphical settings should be documented, the current tool tips feels really basic and do not contain enough information, neither are most of the preview images helpful.
I have not suffered from any mouse lag, and mouse acceleration is disabled by default. The key binding can become problematic since you only can bind an action to one key, hopefully the developers can change this behavior.
The graphics settings you will want to invest your performance on are the shadows and the vegetation quality. Both of these control draw distance of the majority of objects, and at least Medium provides a good trade off for performance / quality.
Performance wise, the game is stable. In all my testing the game never crashed. Not even once, neither did I experience any major bugs / glitches, which shows that Ubisoft puts tremendous effort in order to ensure a good experience.
This wont escape the high GPU usage, a GTX 760 will simply not hit 60 FPS on 1080p at Low settings, you will need a medium end system to truly benefit. Despite some of the aforementioned, this is still an incredibly solid addition to the Far Cry series and a PC version trend we would like to see continued, ideally improved!
Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed our article and want to us create more articles, more often, please consider donating to
PCGamingWiki's Patreon campaign:
-
By Hawaii Beach
PC Reports are a series of quick first impressions regarding the technical aspects of a PC game. For an up to date account of Far Cry 5 fixes and improvements, please visit its respective PCGamingWiki article.
Developed and published by Ubisoft. The game was released on March 27, 2018.
System Requirements
Minimum
CPU: Intel Core i5-2400 3.1 GHz or AMD FX-6300 3.5 GHz RAM: 8 GB HDD: 40 GB GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 670 or AMD Radeon R9 270 (2 GB of VRAM) OS: Windows 7 SP1 (64-bit) Recommended
CPU: Intel Core i7-4770 3.4 GHz or AMD Ryzen 5 1600 3.2 GHz RAM: 16 GB GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 or AMD Radeon R9 390 OS: Windows 8.1, Windows 10 Editor's System
CPU: Intel Core i5-4690K 4.0GHz RAM: 16 GB 1600MHz SSD: Samsung 850 EVO 250 GB GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 970 SSC OS: Windows 10 (Version 1709) (64-bit) I have tested a GTX 760 which barely hit 35 FPS on average in the lowest settings at 1080p. All the tests have been run in 1440p with the specs listed above, and using version 1.2.0. Interestingly, the Uplay client is smart enough to notify you if you are running an outdated version of your GPU drivers, which led me to install the latest game ready drivers (391.35). All the analysis comparison FPS images were conducted with the built-in benchmark, and run twice to ensure that the results are consistent. All settings have been set to Low when comparing the levels of a graphical setting.
Graphics settings
The graphical settings have been cut down to a scarce few options. Features like FXAA, Nvidia's fur textures (HairWorks) and ambient occlusion that were found in previous Far Cry titles are nowhere to be found since Far Cry Primal. Something else I quickly noticed is that the, sometimes distracting, sun glare cannot be disabled. While it is not as bad as Battlefield 3, it certainly catches my attention when trying to look around. Hopefully Ubisoft adds the possibility to disable it with a future patch.
Unlike Far Cry 4 getting changeable FOV support in a day-1 patch, Far Cry 5 features a FOV slider on launch. Though it can be tricky to locate with the option being found under Advanced settings as opposed to something more distinguishable.
Like a few other modern titles restarting the game to apply new graphics settings is a thing of the past. They are applied directly without interrupting your gameplay. I have also noticed how it does not prompt you to save your changes in the Video settings, which for me is a nice gesture as wading through layers of menus can become tedious.
Performance analysis
In this section we are going to look at how each effect impacts frame rate and how each setting changes the visual style of the game. Be sure to check full resolution uncompressed PNGs if you are looking for pixel by pixel detail.
Graphical Presets
The game has four presets, which saves delving into the meat of the options if you wish not to. For some reason this time no preset enables Anti-aliasing. According to the tool-tip available in the options menu, people running the recommend specs listed above should be able to use the High preset on 1080p, but your case may vary.
Texture Filtering
This option controls texture filtering which I suspect uses Anisotropic filtering, the game does not specify the amount of samples, but since it is four options I suspect it ranges from 4x to 16x samples, though this is only an educated guess. Since it does not cause any performance hits on modern processors (see analysis below) I recommend turning it to at least High settings.
Click on the Image to Move the Slider
Shadows
The shadows quality can be controlled. While I have not seen noticeable improvement between High and Ultra settings, the difference between Medium and Low is easy to spot. I would recommend setting the shadows to at least Medium to avoid dots illustrating shadows. We could also use a draw distance slider as you can in some instances notice the shadows loading in as you move around, sure the draw distance is improved with each level, especially comparing Low to Ultra; but an independent option to control it would go a long way.
Click on the Image to Move the Slider
Low settings, as you can imagine, does not do the game any justice in the visual fidelity department. I would advise setting it to at least Medium to eliminate most of the square-looking shadows.
Geometry & Vegetation
According to the tool tips in the options menu: adjust the graphical complexity of the world geometry and vegetation. But the truth is that this setting controls the draw distance, running on Low settings reveals the noticeable pop-in of many objects. I recommend setting this to at least Medium to minimize the pop-in textures.
Click on the Image to Move the Slider
Environment
Since this setting controls the water texture and the separate Water graphical setting does not appear to make a noticeable difference we will be covering it here as well. Setting the option to Medium enables the awe-inspiring reflections in water, but not without cost in the form of a performance hit - see the graphs below.
Click on the Image to Move the Slider
Terrain
This setting improves the texture fidelity of the terrain you are close to and extends the draw distance for the terrain. The Low setting shows a lot of blurry terrain after a couple of meters, so switching it over to at least Medium makes the terrain more defined.
Click on the Image to Move the Slider
Volumetric Fog
This setting does not control the amount of fog, it controls the lightning effects being casted from the environment (including trees, etc). The name of the graphics setting could be misleading, the tool-tip in the options menu does not seem to explain this option properly and the comparison images does not show the real effect of the graphical setting.
Click on the Image to Move the Slider
Field of View
The game features a FOV slider, like every other game Ubisoft have released in the past years. Increasing the FOV from 70 to 95 degrees horizontal (personal preference) will result in a minor FPS drop, roughly about ~5 FPS in my case.
Click on the Image to Move the Slider
Anti-aliasing
For AA options we only have SMAA and TAA available, with only 1x sampling. In comparison to older titles it feels like we are lacking some options with Ubisoft's latest addition to the series. Enabling any AA only shaved off a couple of FPS at Low settings, but will always depend on your location.
The comparison below is not shown in the source quality. See the original image as it's easier to spot the difference on each AA level. If you want AA enabled I would recommend SMAA as it provides the best quality and the least performance hit.
Controls
There are separate sensitivity sliders for different usages, which is a bonus. Mouse Acceleration is disabled by default, and I have had an smooth experience not experiencing any mouse lag. The key binding is disappointing since you only can assign an action to one key. There is a preview image of the keys assigned, but since I have a Swedish keyboard these binds do not match, neither do the extra letters we have in the language match up, which shows that there could be improvements done.
Audio
The audio settings are underwhelming due to a lack of independant sliders for music, sfx and voice. They are all mixed into one volume slider, except VoIP which has its own separate slider.
Conclusion
So conclusion time! The draw distance for each level of all the graphical settings should be documented, the current tool tips feels really basic and do not contain enough information, neither are most of the preview images helpful.
I have not suffered from any mouse lag, and mouse acceleration is disabled by default. The key binding can become problematic since you only can bind an action to one key, hopefully the developers can change this behavior.
The graphics settings you will want to invest your performance on are the shadows and the vegetation quality. Both of these control draw distance of the majority of objects, and at least Medium provides a good trade off for performance / quality.
Performance wise, the game is stable. In all my testing the game never crashed. Not even once, neither did I experience any major bugs / glitches, which shows that Ubisoft puts tremendous effort in order to ensure a good experience.
This wont escape the high GPU usage, a GTX 760 will simply not hit 60 FPS on 1080p at Low settings, you will need a medium end system to truly benefit. Despite some of the aforementioned, this is still an incredibly solid addition to the Far Cry series and a PC version trend we would like to see continued, ideally improved!
Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed our article and want to us create more articles, more often, please consider donating to PCGamingWiki's Patreon campaign:
Click here to view the article
-
By Mirh
All credits to arct, DarthTon and spazzarama
Try master131's Extreme Injector if there is any problem
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By LDK
PC Reports are a series of quick first impressions regarding the technical aspects of a PC game. This report was written by PCGamingWiki contributor LDK. For an up to date account of The Crew fixes and improvements, please visit its respective PCGamingWiki article.
The Crew is online racing game from studios Ivory Tower and Ubisoft Reflections. It takes place in large open world and lets player to explore simplified version of USA. This article will analyze quality of the PC version, how it performs, how it looks and how responsive are the controls.
The game was released on December 2, 2014 for Windows and is available through several digital distribution channels.
System Requirements
Minimum
CPU: AMD Athlon II X4 620, 2.6 GHz or Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300, 2.5 GHz RAM: 4 GB HDD: 15 GB GPU: AMD Radeon HD 4870 or Nvidia GeForce GTX 260 with 512 MB of VRAM Recommended
CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 940, 3.0 GHz or Intel Core i5 750, 2.66 GHz RAM: 8 GB GPU: AMD Radeon HD 6870 or Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 with 1024 MB of VRAM The minimum system requirements are nothing to be afraid of, required CPU's are five years old and GPU's even more so the game should run on majority of today's hardware without any problems. Similar with recommended hardware specs, CPU's are also five years old, but newer architecture with higher clocks. Recommended GPU's are two generations newer then minimum and even those are in the mainstream range.
All the tests have been done on system with Core i7-2700k clocked to 4.5GHz, 32 GB RAM and HD 6870 with 1GB of VRAM. The testing was done in 2560x1600 resolution to eliminate 60 FPS limiter. Benchmark consisted of driving one lap in test drive mode in New York car dealer during the day.
Graphics settings
The game is running on the Babel engine developed in-house by Ivory Tower and offers few tweaks in the graphics options menu. Every common wide-screen resolution is supported and that includes 4k and ultra wide-screen resolutions. 4:3 aspect ratio resolutions are not supported at all and even if you force it by editing configuration files or by using borderless windowed mode, the picture will be stretched from wide-screen resolution.
There is field of view slider, but for some strange reason this slider is not enabled for single screen setups. There is a cvar in the configuration file and editing it moves the slider in the menu, but it has no impact on the game. It should work for multi-monitor setups with AMD Eyefinity or Nvidia Surround technologies, but I was unable to confirm it on my system.
Another issue is forced framerate limiter. It can be set to 30 or 60 frames per second, but higher framerate is not available. Other options in this menu are common effects that can be tweaked or turned off completely.
Overall performance and image quality
The Crew has four quality presets - Low, Medium, High and Ultra. On the Low setting not every option was turned off so be sure to check them if you have performance problems. Also Ultra preset is not setting anti-aliasing to maximum and keeps it to MSAA 4x instead of MSAA 8x.
At the Low preset the game performs very good on my aging GPU considering it has to run at 4Mpix resolution. And even on Low the game doesn't looks half bad. Medium preset offers better shadows and higher resolution of environment mapping and costs around 12% of performance.
Performance drop of High preset is above 18% and further enhances shadows and mirroring on the car. Overall level of detail is better as cutoff for objects to disappear is further. Ultra preset means almost 32% performance drop from Low but I haven't noticed much difference from High. The testing was done with only FXAA instead of presets default anti-aliasing, because I was unable to get consistent results. More about that later.
I've experienced stuttering on some skill races. The game runs on stable framerate, but it stutters a bit when I reach specific point in a few skill races. Other than that, the game runs very nicely. Full resolution screenshots: Scene 1 Low, Medium, High, Ultra; Scene 2 Low, Medium, High, Ultra.
Controls
The Crew is racing game and as such it offers variety of control options. You can drive with keyboard, controller or a steering wheel and each can be separately configured. Even controller buttons can be remapped. Unfortunately I don't own steering wheel so I cannot comment on that, but controller and keyboard controls seemed pretty well done. Button prompts on the screen are changing on the fly and depends on the last input from controller or keyboard.
Plugging the controller in the middle of the game can cause problems though. The game crashed once when I turned controller (wireless 360) on and commonly D-pad was not responding after the controller was connected after the game loads.
Audio
Audio settings menu has several sliders to adjust volume of different aspects of the game's audio. The Crew is also supporting 7.1 surround sound, however surround sound is utilized only for few effects such as bypassing cars, roadwork etc. Radio, voices and car engine sounds only from front speakers. When driving, you can choose from a few radio stations and skip the songs on the fly.
Performance analysis
In this section we are going to look at how each effect impacts framerate and how does each setting looks on screenshots. Be sure to check full resolution uncompressed PNGs linked in each section. Or visit gallery for list of all screenshots for this article.
Anti-aliasing
I've got a few issues with anti-aliasing in The Crew. The main problem is very unstable performance regardless of resolution. MSAA 4x was running fairly OK with expected framerate drop when my car was stationary. When the car moved, the framerate plummeted to unplayable levels. Same with MSAA 8x but much more unstable. This is the reason, why there is no benchmark for each AA method. The FXAA had only small FPS drop as it is just a post process filter. I wasn't able to select TXAA on my AMD card.
As expected the game is heavily aliased and running lines are very much visible on the car without any AA applied (middle section of the comparison above). FXAA offers much better image quality and the textures are almost not affected, however there is slight moire around shard edges on the textures. MSAA preserves texture quality, but the edge blurring is not that strong and I've noticed light glow on some edges (same issue I've encountered in Far Cry 4). Full resolution screenshots: Off, FXAA, MSAA 4x, MSAA 8x.
Ambient Occlusion
The Crew features only two ambient occlusion methods: SSAO, SSAO plus or you can turn AO completely off. SSAO is much stronger than SSAO plus, but not as precise. Performance drop is only 8% for SSAO, but almost 30% for SSAO plus. Full resolution screenshots: Off, SSAO, SSAO plus.
Shadows
Dynamic shadows can be turned off or set to one of four level. Each level is increasing shadows resolution and Contact hardening Soft Shadows should blur some of the hard edges, but I haven't noticed any major difference from High setting. Performance drop noticeable from Off to Low (around 10%), but negligible for additional levels (around 2%). Soft shadows option is exception with performance drop of 21% from no shadows. Full resolution screenshots: Off, Low, Medium, High, Contact Hardening Soft Shadows.
Geometry
This setting is managing polygon resolution of the game's assets and object's cutoff distance from camera. Performance impact is not very substantial and from Low to Ultra the FPS drop is only around 6%, image quality is much better though. Full resolution screenshots: Low, Medium, High, Ultra.
Textures
Textures is the only setting, that requires resetting the game (that is why the car in the screenshots has different color). Impact on the game is rather questionable. From the screenshot the roadway on the right side of car has little bit more details on Low setting and I haven't found any difference on other textures. But that could be affected by weather or the bump map could be generated every time the game is loaded. Nevertheless other textures stayed pretty much the same regardless of texture setting and average framerate also stayed at the same level. Full resolution screenshots: Low, Medium, High, Ultra.
Environment Mapping
This setting affects resolution of real time reflections on player's car. The game looks much better when the effects is set to Ultra as the reflections are very sharp and almost at the same resolution as the rest of the world. Performance impact is around 10% for Ultra setting, 8% for High and 2% for Low. Full resolution screenshots: Low, Medium, High, Ultra.
Depth of Field
I haven't noticed this effect during gameplay but it is heavily used during cutscenes and in the garages. Performance impact is around 5% for Low and 10% for Ultra. Full resolution screenshots:Off, Low, Medium, High.
Grass
Grass setting controls amount of grass billboards in the world. Performance impact of Medium setting is almost none, High setting will cause 5% framerate drop. Full resolution screenshots: Low, Medium, High.
Conclusion
PC version of The Crew is running very well and offers some graphics tweaking. Controls can be heavily adjusted and the game supports controllers and steering wheels apart from standard keyboard and mouse combo (which is more than capable).
There are some issues though. Anti-aliasing was bugged on my system, field of view slider is not enabled for single screen setups and the game stutters occasionally (not as badly as in Far Cry 4, but it is there). Then there is the whole always online thing. The game will not start at all when the servers are offline. This is not good, because every race can be played in single-player and what happens, when Ubisoft decides to pull the plug?
Overall The Crew is an average port without game-breaking issues. Which sadly is success after Ubisoft's disastrous this year season.
The game key has been provided by the publisher and contained the game, several cars and the season pass.
Click here to view the article
-
By LDK
System Requirements
Minimum
CPU: AMD Athlon II X4 620, 2.6 GHz or Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300, 2.5 GHz
RAM: 4 GB
HDD: 15 GB
GPU: AMD Radeon HD 4870 or Nvidia GeForce GTX 260 with 512 MB of VRAM
Recommended
CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 940, 3.0 GHz or Intel Core i5 750, 2.66 GHz
RAM: 8 GB
GPU: AMD Radeon HD 6870 or Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 with 1024 MB of VRAM
The minimum system requirements are nothing to be afraid of, required CPU's are five years old and GPU's even more so the game should run on majority of today's hardware without any problems. Similar with recommended hardware specs, CPU's are also five years old, but newer architecture with higher clocks. Recommended GPU's are two generations newer then minimum and even those are in the mainstream range.
All the tests have been done on system with Core i7-2700k clocked to 4.5GHz, 32 GB RAM and HD 6870 with 1GB of VRAM. The testing was done in 2560x1600 resolution to eliminate 60 FPS limiter. Benchmark consisted of driving one lap in test drive mode in New York car dealer during the day.
Graphics settings
The game is running on the Babel engine developed in-house by Ivory Tower and offers few tweaks in the graphics options menu. Every common wide-screen resolution is supported and that includes 4k and ultra wide-screen resolutions. 4:3 aspect ratio resolutions are not supported at all and even if you force it by editing configuration files or by using borderless windowed mode, the picture will be stretched from wide-screen resolution.
There is field of view slider, but for some strange reason this slider is not enabled for single screen setups. There is a cvar in the configuration file and editing it moves the slider in the menu, but it has no impact on the game. It should work for multi-monitor setups with AMD Eyefinity or Nvidia Surround technologies, but I was unable to confirm it on my system.
Another issue is forced framerate limiter. It can be set to 30 or 60 frames per second, but higher framerate is not available. Other options in this menu are common effects that can be tweaked or turned off completely.
Overall performance and image quality
The Crew has four quality presets - Low, Medium, High and Ultra. On the Low setting not every option was turned off so be sure to check them if you have performance problems. Also Ultra preset is not setting anti-aliasing to maximum and keeps it to MSAA 4x instead of MSAA 8x.
At the Low preset the game performs very good on my aging GPU considering it has to run at 4Mpix resolution. And even on Low the game doesn't looks half bad. Medium preset offers better shadows and higher resolution of environment mapping and costs around 12% of performance.
[compimg]http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_56/gallery_13_56_14849.jpg|http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_56/gallery_13_56_116535.jpg|864|540|Preset Low|Preset Ultra[/compimg]
Performance drop of High preset is above 18% and further enhances shadows and mirroring on the car. Overall level of detail is better as cutoff for objects to disappear is further. Ultra preset means almost 32% performance drop from Low but I haven't noticed much difference from High. The testing was done with only FXAA instead of presets default anti-aliasing, because I was unable to get consistent results. More about that later.
I've experienced stuttering on some skill races. The game runs on stable framerate, but it stutters a bit when I reach specific point in a few skill races. Other than that, the game runs very nicely. Full resolution screenshots: Scene 1 Low, Medium, High, Ultra; Scene 2 Low, Medium, High, Ultra.
[compimg]http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_56/gallery_13_56_20301.jpg|http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_56/gallery_13_56_49343.jpg|864|540|Preset Low|Preset Ultra[/compimg]
Controls
The Crew is racing game and as such it offers variety of control options. You can drive with keyboard, controller or a steering wheel and each can be separately configured. Even controller buttons can be remapped. Unfortunately I don't own steering wheel so I cannot comment on that, but controller and keyboard controls seemed pretty well done. Button prompts on the screen are changing on the fly and depends on the last input from controller or keyboard.
Plugging the controller in the middle of the game can cause problems though. The game crashed once when I turned controller (wireless 360) on and commonly D-pad was not responding after the controller was connected after the game loads.
Audio
Audio settings menu has several sliders to adjust volume of different aspects of the game's audio. The Crew is also supporting 7.1 surround sound, however surround sound is utilized only for few effects such as bypassing cars, roadwork etc. Radio, voices and car engine sounds only from front speakers. When driving, you can choose from a few radio stations and skip the songs on the fly.
Performance analysis
In this section we are going to look at how each effect impacts framerate and how does each setting looks on screenshots. Be sure to check full resolution uncompressed PNGs linked in each section. Or visit gallery for list of all screenshots for this article.
Anti-aliasing
I've got a few issues with anti-aliasing in The Crew. The main problem is very unstable performance regardless of resolution. MSAA 4x was running fairly OK with expected framerate drop when my car was stationary. When the car moved, the framerate plummeted to unplayable levels. Same with MSAA 8x but much more unstable. This is the reason, why there is no benchmark for each AA method. The FXAA had only small FPS drop as it is just a post process filter. I wasn't able to select TXAA on my AMD card.
As expected the game is heavily aliased and running lines are very much visible on the car without any AA applied (middle section of the comparison above). FXAA offers much better image quality and the textures are almost not affected, however there is slight moire around shard edges on the textures. MSAA preserves texture quality, but the edge blurring is not that strong and I've noticed light glow on some edges (same issue I've encountered in Far Cry 4). Full resolution screenshots: Off, FXAA, MSAA 4x, MSAA 8x.
Ambient Occlusion
The Crew features only two ambient occlusion methods: SSAO, SSAO plus or you can turn AO completely off. SSAO is much stronger than SSAO plus, but not as precise. Performance drop is only 8% for SSAO, but almost 30% for SSAO plus. Full resolution screenshots: Off, SSAO, SSAO plus.
[compimg]http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_56/gallery_13_56_191958.jpg|http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_56/gallery_13_56_121120.jpg|864|540|Ambient Occlusion Off|Ambient Occlusion SSAO plus[/compimg]
Shadows
Dynamic shadows can be turned off or set to one of four level. Each level is increasing shadows resolution and Contact hardening Soft Shadows should blur some of the hard edges, but I haven't noticed any major difference from High setting. Performance drop noticeable from Off to Low (around 10%), but negligible for additional levels (around 2%). Soft shadows option is exception with performance drop of 21% from no shadows. Full resolution screenshots: Off, Low, Medium, High, Contact Hardening Soft Shadows.
[compimg]http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_56/gallery_13_56_59339.jpg|http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_56/gallery_13_56_1322.jpg|864|540|Shadows Off|Contact Hardening Soft Shadows[/compimg]
Geometry
This setting is managing polygon resolution of the game's assets and object's cutoff distance from camera. Performance impact is not very substantial and from Low to Ultra the FPS drop is only around 6%, image quality is much better though. Full resolution screenshots: Low, Medium, High, Ultra.
[compimg]http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_56/gallery_13_56_181349.jpg|http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_56/gallery_13_56_192114.jpg|864|540|Geometry Low|Geometry Ultra[/compimg]
Textures
Textures is the only setting, that requires resetting the game (that is why the car in the screenshots has different color). Impact on the game is rather questionable. From the screenshot the roadway on the right side of car has little bit more details on Low setting and I haven't found any difference on other textures. But that could be affected by weather or the bump map could be generated every time the game is loaded. Nevertheless other textures stayed pretty much the same regardless of texture setting and average framerate also stayed at the same level. Full resolution screenshots: Low, Medium, High, Ultra.
[compimg]http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_56/gallery_13_56_60975.jpg|http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_56/gallery_13_56_72985.jpg|864|540|Textures Low|Textures Ultra[/compimg]
Environment Mapping
This setting affects resolution of real time reflections on player's car. The game looks much better when the effects is set to Ultra as the reflections are very sharp and almost at the same resolution as the rest of the world. Performance impact is around 10% for Ultra setting, 8% for High and 2% for Low. Full resolution screenshots: Low, Medium, High, Ultra.
[compimg]http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_56/gallery_13_56_175457.jpg|http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_56/gallery_13_56_158793.jpg|864|540|Environment Mapping Low|Environment Mapping Ultra[/compimg]
Depth of Field
I haven't noticed this effect during gameplay but it is heavily used during cutscenes and in the garages. Performance impact is around 5% for Low and 10% for Ultra. Full resolution screenshots:Off, Low, Medium, High.
[compimg]http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_56/gallery_13_56_23488.jpg|http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_56/gallery_13_56_107328.jpg|864|540|Depth of Field Off|Depth of Field High[/compimg]
Grass
Grass setting controls amount of grass billboards in the world. Performance impact of Medium setting is almost none, High setting will cause 5% framerate drop. Full resolution screenshots: Low, Medium, High.
[compimg]http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_56/gallery_13_56_30832.jpg|http://community.pcgamingwiki.com/uploads/gallery/album_56/gallery_13_56_108046.jpg|864|540|Grass Low|Grass High[/compimg]
Conclusion
PC version of The Crew is running very well and offers some graphics tweaking. Controls can be heavily adjusted and the game supports controllers and steering wheels apart from standard keyboard and mouse combo (which is more than capable).
There are some issues though. Anti-aliasing was bugged on my system, field of view slider is not enabled for single screen setups and the game stutters occasionally (not as badly as in Far Cry 4, but it is there). Then there is the whole always online thing. The game will not start at all when the servers are offline. This is not good, because every race can be played in single-player and what happens, when Ubisoft decides to pull the plug?
Overall The Crew is an average port without game-breaking issues. Which sadly is success after Ubisoft's disastrous this year season.
The game key has been provided by the publisher and contained the game, several cars and the season pass.
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