Far Cry "Lighting Quality" Artifacts

I felt like playing Far Cry again, so I bought it on Steam and downloaded it. The first time I downloaded it, I set everything to max and tried playing it. At the very first part things were fine, but once I could see outside, artifacts like crazy. I tried lowering detail and what not, but it didn't seem to help. So, I thought I might as well delete the game, and download it again while I was sleeping, it wouldn't hurt. It didn't help either.

I figured out that low detail worked fine, and max detail did not. So, I slowly put everything from low to max. Eventually I was able to max everything out except for one setting, "lighting quality". Once this setting goes above the low setting, it artifacts. The artifacts are mostly blue, green and red shapes, being warped towards the center of the screen, sort of like if you were flying through space very quickly, if that makes any sense.

I have yet to see any artifacts in anything else, and my video card is only like a month old and well treated. Temps never go above 70C or so either.

I'm using the latest drivers that were out about a month ago. I doubt that they're too old, but maybe too new. This is some sort of bug with my newer hardware, right? Any known work arounds?

I can play the game on max, except for lighting quality, but it defeats the purpose of playing it again if I have to compromise.

Edit: I realized that I can set each of these settings to custom, and enter my own values. There are about 10 different values for "lighting quality", and I suppose I will manually change each one to the default for very high one by one, and see which one it is. It'll take some time, and I don't feel like doing it at the moment.

I started playing the game on my 8800GTS earlier this month. I get artifacts and for some reason the grass turns from green to black. Sorry that I've not been any help, I thought I would share the experience.

masakabassist said:

I started playing the game on my 8800GTS earlier this month.

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Dude, it's the 5th.

But I know what you mean. You'd think that video cards just do processing, but no, they take over everything. I remember reading about how ATI Cards didn't render grass in HL2 properly, while the Nvidia card did (or vise versa). I think this is something similar where it doesn't know how to render one specific thing. I think it's probably a software problem, but I doubt it'll ever be fixed with a newer driver.. No one cares about old Far Cry(except for us masakabassist).

The only problems I ever had like this were from OC's that were too high.That doesn't sound like the case here though.

The 4 times I played before deleting, all had artifact issues.

That game is garbage.

I bought the Jewel Case version recently.

My 6800GS plays everything maxed out perfectly. Really.

I'll bet it's probably a driver issue - have you tried rolling back to earlier incarnations?

The 6800 plays Far Cry well, I've done it. I've actually had a very rare 5200 Ultra play Far Cry on medium settings just fine. It looked great too. We thought it was a demanding game, but then Crysis came out.

I haven't tried rolling back my drivers, it's just not something that I would like to do. I did upgrade the drivers to the latest version (slightly newer), the problem is still there.

It is not an overclocking issue. I think I may have overclocked it once maybe 50Mhz or so, but it didn't have any problems, and has run at stock since. It is specifically only when I set the lighting quality to anything above low.

I think my hardware is too new for the game. Oh well. I've been playing the game since, everything else is maxed out except for lighting, and it's running awesome. Haven't seen a single artifact.

It might have something to do with the version of the game you are running... which patch does steam update it to? I remember running it maxed w hdr+aa on my x1800xt and it was awesome.

chevro1et said:

which patch does steam update it to?

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Steam has version 1.4

I don't recall saying any HDR settings in the game though.

Did you dl the patch for the game? I remembered having graphic issues with the game, until I dl the patch and it fixed the problem.

Runs fine for me on Gametap..

The exact same problem here, I own a Radeon 1950 Pro AGP and the DVD version of the game, anything other than Low quality lighting and the artifacts appear (open spaces only, I think it has something to do with grass/vegetation rendering/lighting). It doesn't happen in other games or graphic intensive apps (CoD 4, Driver Parallel Lines, ATI Toyshop demo).

"Googling" I found this:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/97832-13-farcry-patch-lighting-artifacts -> seventh post, Tejstar

so it seems recent drivers are not the problem

and:

http://www.ngohq.com/games/13667-far-cry-graphical-coruption-patch-1-4-a.html

A few other artifacts that I have noticed.... The plants at the bottom of the water... I can see the outline of the picture that is there. For example, even though it looks like a plant with sticks coming off of it, it's still a square picture. We're not supposed to see the outline, but I do.(Maybe that's due to lighting quality?) Second, is a problem with blood on the corpses. It tends to flicker, I've seen that in other games as well.

And I am running V1.4, the latest via Steam.