For all its flaws, Far Cry 6 is unquestionably a game best experienced in high definition with the settings cranked up if your gaming PC can handle it. Unfortunately, the optional 35GB HD texture pack might be a little too far out of reach for most, as it’s a greedy VRAM gobbling monster that few graphics cards can feed.
To Ubisoft’s credit, Far Cry 6 explicitly tells you in the menu that you’ll need at least 11GB of video memory to run the HD texture pack. Sadly, it’s a curiously restrictive requirement that raises eyebrows, as it means the Nvidia RTX 3060 meets the right specification just fine with its chonky 12GB of VRAM, but the meatier RTX 3060 Ti falls short with just 8GB. Even Nvidia’s flagship RTX 3080 is a gigabyte out of reach and sometimes fails to load textures properly.
Fortunately, DSOGaming’s performance analysis shows that the RTX 3080 and the RTX 2080 Ti can just about handle the HD texture pack when running the game at 1440p resolution. Crank this up to 4K with ray tracing on, however, and you’ll have a bit of a problem, as low resolution textures end up mixed in with their high resolution counterparts.
If you’re struggling, Ubisoft suggests you play the game without the pack or flick the option off in the Far Cry 6 settings if you already have it installed. You’ll still experience the same game, as Yara is quite a captivating landscape – even if our Far Cry 6 review finds the game far from revolutionary.
This isn’t the only performance issue it suffers from, as the same report also criticises Far Cry 6’s processor optimisation. The game seems to play nicely with gaming CPUs featuring better instructions per clock (IPC), but HyperThreading can sometimes tank your frames by as much as 10fps, so you might want to disable it in the BIOS before booting.
So, the question is can you run it? Test your PC against the Far Cry 6 system requirements over at PCGameBenchmark to see if your rig’s up to the task. If it is and you’re still struggling, disable the Ubisoft Connect overlay to see if that helps your performance – it might even solve these HD texture pack problems.