Far Cry 2

What works

Installation worked perfectly, no errors.

Played single-player story mode for several hours.

Tested multiplayer by hosting a listen LAN server and running around for a bit.

Unlike earlier test results submitted by others, I fortunately had no issues with anti-aliasing and texture details after installing DXVK (see workarounds).

What does not

There's no option in the settings menu for the DirectX 10 render mode, although this isn't a bad thing - DX10 was very buggy in when I used to play this on Windows 7.

Benchmark tool crashes with a DirectX error, but isn't necessary to play the game.

Map editor hangs at startup and never actually loads.

Dedicated server launcher immediately quits with E_SESSION_ERROR_ACCOUNT_LOGON_DISCONNECTED in its console window -- is it expecting an Ubisoft account to be logged in or something?

Workarounds

I applied three workarounds:

1. winetricks dxvk
2. Large address aware patch on farcry2.exe
3. farcry2.exe -GameProfile_SkipIntroMovies 1 -RenderProfile_MaxFps 30
   

The default Wine D3D renderer was no good. Main menus were fine, but I only got a black screen in-game. Adjusting graphics settings didn't fix this for me.

The LAA patch fixes the game crashing during loading screens, as well as random crashes throughout the game. Haven't had a single crash since.

Lastly, starting the game with -GameProfile_SkipIntroMovies 1 -RenderProfile_MaxFps 30 skips the obnoxious Ubisoft logos and caps the game at 30fps (see extra comments for explanation). Going above 60fps is bad because it causes physics bugs, "bouncing NPCs" and countless other kinds of problems.

What was not tested

Multiplayer against another human player. I managed to host a LAN game and run around for a few minutes, so it appears to work. The master servers are long dead so it's LAN only -- unless you have a VPN solution, e.g. SoftEther.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU: Nvidia
• Driver: proprietary

Additional Comments

Initial testing with the -RenderProfile_MaxFps 60 startup parameter was not good. Using DXVK_HUD=fps,compiler I observed my framerate going up and down like a yo-yo. Max graphics or min graphics didn't make a slightest bit of difference -- one minute I'm getting a nice smooth 55-60fps, then it suddenly plummets to ~20fps, then jumps back up to ~40fps. I know for a fact it isn't my system specs because I used to get 60fps on Windows 7. I can't explain it.

However, -RenderProfile_MaxFps 30 has made the game much more playable. The massive framerate drops are completely gone and I get the gorgeous visuals of max graphics, but the trade-off is overall smoothness. I believe the console version of the game ran at 30fps, so it's definitely playable (but don't quote me on that!).

Rating bronze mainly because the performance is too inconsistent. I mean, technically the game works, but I wouldn't say it "works excellently for normal use" to justify a silver rating.