Face-Off: Far Cry 3

[Administrator]

On a technical level, Far Cry 3 gave us some cause for concern at an early preview event in October, where we saw some nasty glitches, an abundance of full-screen tearing and even outright freezes on the 360 code we had to play with. This was all in the face of what appeared to be a broad and beautiful open-world FPS - a rare beast in the ongoing climate of the grim and grey - with an intriguing focus on territoriality and survival during a pirate take-over. The promise was there, but somewhat eclipsed by a clearly unoptimised build.
It's typical to see these kinds of gremlins pop up with early code and so we held hope that developer Ubisoft Montreal had the gumption to deliver a squeaky-clean final build this week. The underlying engine, now relabelled Dunia 2, already has a proven track record for delivering a solid experience on multiple platforms. However, with extra features such as dynamic weather, global illumination, and improved water shaders being leveraged into this updated version, can the PS3 and 360 versions still make a respectable showing compared to the reference PC release?
Let's have a look at image quality first. To get an idea of how texture and effects quality compare between the PC, 360 and PS3 renditions, we've put together a 50-strong Far Cry 3 comparison gallery based on like-for-like frames. Due to the motion blur in effect on PC, the static nature of these assets doesn't always bring out the best results for that platform - so we've also produced every combination of comparison video between the three versions below.
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