It is hard to form a bottom line for this game yet since we haven't had time yet to evaluate it fully. Therefore, we will just end this article with a conclusion of what we've found so far. We can conclude that Far Cry 3 is the game we have all been waiting for in terms of a graphics challenging DX11 game for 2012. It is no surprise that I have been disappointed lately with the latest games this fall in terms of DX11 graphics quality and lack of challenging current video cards and pushing the industry forward. Far Cry 3 is the first game that I can say I am happy with this fall for tickling my video card enthusiast interest.

The first aspect I was shocked, and pleased at, was how challenging the game was graphically even at 2560x1600 with NO AA and Ultra settings. This is with today's highest-end GTX 680 and HD 7970 GHz Edition, yet it seems we may have to lower settings at 2560x1600 to get the best experience. We did find that 1080p performs a lot better, and it looks like at least 4X MSAA at 1080p will be playable on these cards in the game. Our testing has revealed that moving up to 2560x1600 takes a very large hit on performance, maybe even more so than enabling MSAA. This means if you are on a large display, you may be looking at SLI or CrossFire for the best experience.

We were pleased to find both SLI and CrossFire working well on day 1. The scaling is good, and the benefit in framerate is real. We found that SLI and CrossFire allowed MSAA at 2560x1600 with playable performance. However, we did experience stuttering on 7970 GHz Edition CrossFire at 2560x1600 with 4X MSAA, and we did not experience this with SLI. We also found that at 1080p with 8X MSAA the stuttering went away on 7970 GHz Edition CrossFire, and had the same smoothness as SLI at that setting. We will be looking into this more.

Visually, Far Cry 3 is stunning. We haven't had a chance yet to make direct image quality comparisons, but we will in the full evaluation. Overall we found the texture quality to be quite good on the PC, the shadows looked good, the lighting looked good, and we even noticed areas where ambient occlusion is visible for a change. The vegetation is a key visual quality part of this game, and again to get the best quality you will want to use the Enhanced Alpha to Coverage setting.