My first thought is the driver (too new). I had a very similar issue (poor performance when leaving the bunker) with a GeForce GTX 760. But in my case I was getting 2 - 3 FPS at most.
After doing some digging, I found another, much more compatible driver and now I have something like 300 FPS.
Unfortunately, I’m not very familiar with newer AMD (ATI) cards, so can’t really recommend a specific driver version (maybe someone else can?). Otherwise, you’ll need to figure it out for yourself, through trial and error. 😀 A good starting point would be to search for the oldest driver that works with your video card and go from there. Your video card was released in 2009, while the driver you’re currently using was released in 2014 - so you definitely have many older driver options 😀

I'm using Catalyst 8.12 on my 9800 Pro and it runs terrific there at up to 720p, though I play it on this setup at 1024x768. I don't think 8.12 supports the HD5xxx but it does support the HD4xxx , so maybe something around that version?

bloodem wrote on 2021-05-17, 04:32:

My first thought is the driver (too new). I had a very similar issue (poor performance when leaving the bunker) with a GeForce GTX 760. But in my case I was getting 2 - 3 FPS at most.
After doing some digging, I found another, much more compatible driver and now I have something like 300 FPS.
Unfortunately, I’m not very familiar with newer AMD (ATI) cards, so can’t really recommend a specific driver version (maybe someone else can?). Otherwise, you’ll need to figure it out for yourself, through trial and error. 😀 A good starting point would be to search for the oldest driver that works with your video card and go from there. Your video card was released in 2009, while the driver you’re currently using was released in 2014 - so you definitely have many older driver options 😀

having to mess around with driver versions sounds awful, that just shouldn't be happening at all and hints that the nominal 'compatibility' of modern hardware and modern drivers mingled with older OSes is a poor recipe

if it's from GOG then I guess it *should* work on whatever it was downloaded on, even a budget desktop with onboard minimal 3d shared memory graphics and certainly with a basic graphics card (the much maligned NVS300 should chew through far cry with ease for example)

So I'm not sure what's up, did it work on a modern OS?

it's either

A) mixture of old OS and newer hardware plus drivers
B) newer card's drivers cant cope with older games sometimes irrespective of OS (surely not!)
C) GOG download games are not really the same as the original and have requirements outside of what they had first time round (according to gog website requirements, also no)

In my case I have the original Far Cry DVD copy, and I still had issues with some new nVIDIA drivers.

Now, about...

gerry wrote on 2021-05-17, 15:35:

[...] that just shouldn't be happening at all [...]

This is not accurate. I would say the fact that (sometimes) a modern GPU (with modern drivers) can even run a 10+ year old game is a miracle in and of itself.
I'm a programmer (albeit, not a game engine / driver programmer). However, I can tell you that, generally speaking, maintaining backwards compatibility is and always will be a pain - it will increase complexity, decrease efficiency tremendously and it comes with a domino effect. Sometimes, you just have to say "STOP", and rewrite everything from scratch. While doing so, you willfully acknowledge that by starting fresh, you need to focus on optimizing for modern technologies and completely disregard everything that is older than X years.

If you lower the settings to low does your performance improve? I have had a lot of trouble with Far Cry water... even with graphics cards that are more or less of the XP era. My guess would be that most of the game settings will run maxed out and you might have to drop one or two settings to medium and then all of your FPS will come back.

try to check CPU/GPU load to better understand where the bottleneck actually is. i don't know if there's a suitable old version of msi afterburner/RTSS floating around for XP, but at any rate, you could just check what the CPU load graphs in task manager are doing and run GPU-Z (probably an older version as well at this point), or a similar tool. a quick method would be to just run that same sequence at 640x480.

but otherwise, indeed it's quite possible you just have to move to an older driver. if that doesn't help, besides getting the original disc, what i'd also try is test the game on onboard audio or some audigy - never been a fan of the x-fi cards as they gave me bad stuttering issues in certain games, among other problems.

Thanks for the replies everyone.

I uninstalled Catalyst 14.4 and tried Catalyst 12.8. Totally fixed. Runs great at 1600x1200 with everything maxed out (including anti-aliasing).

TBH I was sort of surprised that the driver was TOO NEW, since I expected the GOG version of the game to be playable on modern (like modern as in current at the time of the GoG release) hardware. As Gerry mentioned, I had kind of assumed "too new" would be less of an issue with GOG versions of games. Maybe my system is in kind of a no-mans land where it's waaaay newer than the game but nowhere near powerful enough to brute force its way through absolutely anything...

Some other notes:
Catalyst 10.2 refused to install. Installer claimed it didn't find compatible hardware, even though the Release Notes include HD 5800 Series on the list.
I installed the same Far Cry GOG on my period-correct machine (Athlon 64 x2 s939 with Radeon X850, running Catalyst 9.3) and the game runs okay on mostly medium settings at 1024x768

You guys are awesome!

nice that this fixed it, this might be one of the worst cases of driver regression then.

i never thought that gog did all that much magic beyond including dosbox with their dos releases. as for the x850 performance: if i recall correctly SM 3.0 was patched in at some point and this release probably has it so the card likely can't run the game at full detail anyway. i think there also was a 64-bit patch with some higher quality models/geometry of all things so that may be interesting to mess around with too, if it's not already ported to this release.

bloodem wrote on 2021-05-17, 16:58:

In my case I have the original Far Cry DVD copy, and I still had issues with some new nVIDIA drivers. […]
Show full quote

In my case I have the original Far Cry DVD copy, and I still had issues with some new nVIDIA drivers.

Now, about...

gerry wrote on 2021-05-17, 15:35:

[...] that just shouldn't be happening at all [...]

This is not accurate. I would say the fact that (sometimes) a modern GPU (with modern drivers) can even run a 10+ year old game is a miracle in and of itself.
I'm a programmer (albeit, not a game engine / driver programmer). However, I can tell you that, generally speaking, maintaining backwards compatibility is and always will be a pain - it will increase complexity, decrease efficiency tremendously and it comes with a domino effect. Sometimes, you just have to say "STOP", and rewrite everything from scratch. While doing so, you willfully acknowledge that by starting fresh, you need to focus on optimizing for modern technologies and completely disregard everything that is older than X years.

ideally the hardware driver doesnt do anything but interpret the OS instruction given to it and the OS instruction copes with legacy code by correctly mapping the old 'meaning' to the new one

as such a user shouldn't have to mess about with driver versions in order to find a lucky match

I suspect there is something in the way far cry works that is not exactly 'by the book' and therefore doesn't readily translate.

if that were not the case we'd expect all directx 9 games to display the same issues with this specific OS / driver combination, who knows maybe that's the case

i don't blame far cry developers though, their job was to get the game ready and running on the PCs of the time by any means necessary

I'm sure the directx developers also map old to new in a solid 'by the book' manner and probably accommodate lots of known nuances too

the driver developers then correctly interpret the directx instructions received

in between the 3 far cry has a problem that most games don't seem to though, but having to swap around driver versions isn't really a sign of progress more sign of something tripping up unintentionally due to some uncaptured quirk between Application, OS and driver . Only when MS say "directx 9 wont be supported" will it be ok for drivers to fail to implement a valid directx9 instruction

auron wrote on 2021-05-18, 04:19:

nice that this fixed it, this might be one of the worst cases of driver regression then.

i never thought that gog did all that much magic beyond including dosbox with their dos releases. as for the x850 performance: if i recall correctly SM 3.0 was patched in at some point and this release probably has it so the card likely can't run the game at full detail anyway. i think there also was a 64-bit patch with some higher quality models/geometry of all things so that may be interesting to mess around with too, if it's not already ported to this release.

yes i was hoping gog would do some magic to assure the game would run on a system 'now', but i guess that's quite a lot to ask given all the variables

gerry wrote on 2021-05-18, 09:19:

ideally the hardware driver doesnt do anything but interpret the OS instruction given to it and the OS instruction copes with le […]
Show full quote

ideally the hardware driver doesnt do anything but interpret the OS instruction given to it and the OS instruction copes with legacy code by correctly mapping the old 'meaning' to the new one

as such a user shouldn't have to mess about with driver versions in order to find a lucky match

I suspect there is something in the way far cry works that is not exactly 'by the book' and therefore doesn't readily translate.

if that were not the case we'd expect all directx 9 games to display the same issues with this specific OS / driver combination, who knows maybe that's the case

i don't blame far cry developers though, their job was to get the game ready and running on the PCs of the time by any means necessary

I'm sure the directx developers also map old to new in a solid 'by the book' manner and probably accommodate lots of known nuances too

the driver developers then correctly interpret the directx instructions received

in between the 3 far cry has a problem that most games don't seem to though, but having to swap around driver versions isn't really a sign of progress more sign of something tripping up unintentionally due to some uncaptured quirk between Application, OS and driver . Only when MS say "directx 9 wont be supported" will it be ok for drivers to fail to implement a valid directx9 instruction

Yes, I agree with what you said (at least in an ideal world this would be the case). Unfortunately this type of stuff is very common and has been happening since the Windows 95/98 days. There are countless instances even with earlier nVIDIA and ATI drivers where, past a certain driver version, specific games stopped working. Just ran into such an issue a few days ago on Windows 98. NFS High Stakes did not work with nVIDIA driver version 45.23, however it worked just fine with 30.82.

I agree with you Gerry, probably there is something.... unconventional... going on in Far Cry that both ATI and nVidia seemed to have given up on supporting at some point. I find it mildly amusing that bloodem had a similar issue with a new-ish (for XP) GeForce card.

It seems like GOG sometimes puts in an enormous heap of effort to rework a game but sometimes they don't.

Fortunately I don't see any disadvantage to using Catalyst 12.8 versus 14.4. All of the other games I have installed on that computer (so far) work and perform just as well. I guess I'm happy enough with that!

SATA disks are faster with text mode drivers installed and a RAID setup for most mid to high end XP games works a treat. Stuff SSD's though cf and tf card adapters don't need trimming.

This video card is too modern, and this game is full of hardcoded lines with performance stuff. I've already played this game at 20fps on a celeron m480 with Sis Mirage or something, and the performance, even at lowest, was playable. In your configuration, this is totally out of the ordinary. Try running on the onboard video card, Intel GMA950 onwards it is already possible to play it for testing

I wonder If this is maybe fixable with something like nvidia inspector. My idea is to get a record of the driver settings from lets say forceware 65 and then apply that to a newer driver and maybe even turning off flags that where not possible to set with a lower direct x version.

(can't find a working version of the profile inspector for xp anymore)

I recently played the entire Far Cry series, and FC1 ran like crap on a brand new build, using the Steam version.

The reason is that it does not like multi-threaded CPU's, that old Cryengine (Can it run Crysis?) is really dependent on single thread performance, it came out at a bad time (when single threads were hitting a wall and Athlon X2 just came out)
Might have fixed it with these
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Far_Cry

badconduct wrote on 2022-03-23, 02:54:

I recently played the entire Far Cry series, and FC1 ran like crap on a brand new build, using the Steam version. […]
Show full quote

I recently played the entire Far Cry series, and FC1 ran like crap on a brand new build, using the Steam version.

The reason is that it does not like multi-threaded CPU's, that old Cryengine (Can it run Crysis?) is really dependent on single thread performance, it came out at a bad time (when single threads were hitting a wall and Athlon X2 just came out)
Might have fixed it with these
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Far_Cry

multi-threaded is no reason for poor performance. Hyper-threading existed as early as 2003 and multi-thread optimization at the programming level is the same, whether it's a "virtual" thread on a Pentium 4 or a physical thread on an Athlon X2. I believe that this was the programmers' lack of willingness to optimize the code for this use.

FarCry 2 also suffered hard with performance problems on some systems at the time, precisely because of problems with the code, among them, problems with CPUs of more than one core, it was quite common at that time we had to use msconfig to turn off the other core of the dual core processor, so that the game would run smoothly (otherwise, you would have performance problems, and CTD all the time). I believe they fixed this later in FC2.

But to give you an idea of how FarCry 1 has critical performance issues, FarCry 1 ran very well on the Xbox Classic, which still has a 700mhz Pentium 3 processor, and an undeclocked Geforce 4-like GPU.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rB7ATwHFSO8

Edit: At that time, I had an entry-level notebook, a Clevo M540SS with a Celeron 430 (or 530) 1.8ghz single core processor, 1gb of ddr2 ram, and a Sis M672 graphics card, or some crap like that, I could barely play GTA san andreas on low at 800x600 with that crap , but I was still able to run farcry 1 until the end.

Rikintosh wrote on 2022-03-23, 18:41:

multi-threaded is no reason for poor performance. Hyper-threading existed as early as 2003 and multi-thread optimization at the […]
Show full quote

badconduct wrote on 2022-03-23, 02:54:

I recently played the entire Far Cry series, and FC1 ran like crap on a brand new build, using the Steam version. […]
Show full quote

I recently played the entire Far Cry series, and FC1 ran like crap on a brand new build, using the Steam version.

The reason is that it does not like multi-threaded CPU's, that old Cryengine (Can it run Crysis?) is really dependent on single thread performance, it came out at a bad time (when single threads were hitting a wall and Athlon X2 just came out)
Might have fixed it with these
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Far_Cry

multi-threaded is no reason for poor performance. Hyper-threading existed as early as 2003 and multi-thread optimization at the programming level is the same, whether it's a "virtual" thread on a Pentium 4 or a physical thread on an Athlon X2. I believe that this was the programmers' lack of willingness to optimize the code for this use.

FarCry 2 also suffered hard with performance problems on some systems at the time, precisely because of problems with the code, among them, problems with CPUs of more than one core, it was quite common at that time we had to use msconfig to turn off the other core of the dual core processor, so that the game would run smoothly (otherwise, you would have performance problems, and CTD all the time). I believe they fixed this later in FC2.

But to give you an idea of how FarCry 1 has critical performance issues, FarCry 1 ran very well on the Xbox Classic, which still has a 700mhz Pentium 3 processor, and an undeclocked Geforce 4-like GPU.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rB7ATwHFSO8

Edit: At that time, I had an entry-level notebook, a Clevo M540SS with a Celeron 430 (or 530) 1.8ghz single core processor, 1gb of ddr2 ram, and a Sis M672 graphics card, or some crap like that, I could barely play GTA san andreas on low at 800x600 with that crap , but I was still able to run farcry 1 until the end.

Far Cry 2 (which also ran terrible, agreed) was a bad port from Console, it doesn't use the same engine. It used a different engine based on Cryengine called Dunia.

Hyperthreading may have existed in '04, but the core2 wasn't released until 2006. Programs, specially Windows, weren't really designed to take advantage of multiple threads. The P4's were started to plateau in performance as well. (The core2 is actually designed around the PIII chip, interestingly enough).

As I said though, there's an issue with Far Cry 1, 2 and 3 + Blooddragon which all ran poorly on modern hardware for me, they don't handle the mutlithreading well. It's been awhile, but I think I had bad stuttering on FC1. FC2 barely ran above 60 FPS, and same with Fc3, but there was a fix in Fc3.

Mechwarrior Online also uses the Cryengine, and it runs like absolute garbage on my old ThreadRipper 1920x and my FX-8350 chips. It boosted a lot more on my newer Ryzen 5800x. Both of my old chips lacked the single-thread speed for the netcode.

You also shouldn't compare PC performance to Console performance. Far Cry instincts is not Far Cry, it's a completely different game. They have nothing in common except the name. Instincts wasn't made by Crytech. Console games are built from the ground up to take advantage of all the hardware 100%. PC games don't know what they are running on, so they fluctuate. PC's also have a lot of other software (like the OS) running in the background.
You can lock the frame rate and make frame by frame graphic adjustments to make it steady 30 FPS. PC can't do that.

I dont see these problems with any of the Farcry games, but I only have non multicore AMD CPUs.