Making Far Cry 4 (via Boot Camp) playable on Mac Pro

Question

Making Far Cry 4 (via Boot Camp) playable on Mac Pro

I have two Macs:

A Mid-2012 Macbook Pro with a GT 650M graphics chip and a Mac Pro Early 2008 with both an ATI HD 2600 XT and a GeForce 9600 GT.

Both run Boot Camp with Windows 7.

I am trying to play Far Cry 4 on them.

When I purchased FC4 end of December 2014, it was still playable on the MacBook Pro. I got a decent frame rate (around 25-30fps, IIRC). Somehow, though, recently the frame rate dropped to an average of 15-20, which makes the game quite unplayable now. I have no idea what caused this change, but I am quite sure it wasn't as bad in the beginning. I even re-installed Win7 totally fresh, reset all the settings etc, to no avail. I wonder if FC4 made changes that have caused this - there is no way to go back to earlier versions of the game to find out, though.

So I thought: Let's see, maybe the game works better on my Mac Pro. The ATI card certainly *****, but the GeForce 9600 is a bit better (it's a plain PC version, not a special Apple version - it works just fine apart from being blank during the Mac's boot up sequence - but since I have two monitors, one on each of the cards, I see the startup screen on the ATI's monitor just fine).

Alas, when I installed Win7 fresh on the Mac Pro, it worked fine, even without installing any Boot Camp drives. Then I installed Steam, UPlay and FC4. When starting FC4, screen goes black and the Mac becomes unresponsive. So I tried adding the Boot Camp drivers. But that only led to the entire Windows going dead. Now I have to see if I can repair that damage again or if I have to re-install Win7 once again (which is a huge pain, as it goes about restarting about two dozen times, installing updates bit by bit - took the the entire sunday).

Anyway. Now I wonder if someone has some more tips. I guess I can't do something about the bad framerate on the MacBook, unless someone has run into the same problem and figure that out? (But I could not google anything on this, so I guess I'm left alone with this).

So the other idea was to put yet a bigger graphics card into the Mac Pro. Has someone tried this? It needs to be DirectX 11 capable, I suspect (supposedly, FC4 needs that, and the 9600 is only DX10 capable). So, does someone know if there are Graphics cards for the Mac Pro that have a better performance than the 4 years younger MacPro with its GT 650M?

Posted on Aug 10, 2015 1:46 AM

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Answer 1

Aug 10, 2015 2:48 PM in response to Thomas Tempelmann

Surprise!

Now, a day after the update orgy with dozens of reboots, Win7 on the MacBook wants to install another NVidia program. After that's been installed, it resets my custom resolutions and other setting without my consent, and then brings up a dialog offering to look for games in order to optimize settings for them. I let it do that, but it finds no games (does not even see my Far Cry 4 installation), but when I then try out FC4, it's back to its original performance! So, it was some missing system software that I had little control over it getting installed, but suddenly it's all good again. I still wonder what happened back a while ago when it became so slow. Did I perhaps uninstall that once-before installed weird NVidia software because I thought it served no purpose?

Who knows. But I'm happy now as I can play FC4 again (though, it gets rather repetitive after a while). No more need to fiddle with the Mac Pro's graphics then.

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Answer 2

Johnb-one

Level 6

9,180 points

Aug 10, 2015 8:38 AM in response to Thomas Tempelmann

well, Thomas T. I can help you a little bit.....yes...there are Graphics cards for the Mac Pro that may have better performance than a MacBoook pro.

however---you are running a 2008 Mac Pro tower, so any card you put in there will run a bit slower due to bus speed. If you wanted Mac Compatibility

I'd say maybe Sapphiretech 7950 with 3 gigs Vram, but seeing as how that doesn't matter that much to you, depending on what version of OS X you're running, the R9 290 or 390x may work for you. Dunno about nvidia. maybe the GTX 980 from evga would do the job. I'd also be inclined to see if there are any updates for the Windows version of Steam, UPlay, and Far Cry 4, and for the drivers for your current video card. I've looked up the requirements for Far cry 4 and here's what it says: Windows 7 SP 1, 4 gigs memory, Geforce GTX 460 or Radeon 5850 (1 gig vram) for bare minimum, intel Core i5@ 2.6 Ghz. Recommended is 8 gigs memory, R9 290X video card or better, same windows requirements. I think the chip in your Macbook pro has maybe 1 gig of ram

so that's not the whole problem. However, you are running a virtual box, Bootcamp, so for best results you'd need to have something a bit beefier, for video card, system, etc. I'd also check to see if there are any Bootcamp updates, esp for video card drivers, etc eetc .. I've heard that BootChamp may be helpful.

So....in answer to your question....yes absolutely. Can you run Far Cry 4 on your Mac Pro?? that remains to be seen. on the OS X side are you using 10.10.4? The HD 2600XT and the GeForce 9600 are pretty old video cards and not really that powerful.I'd also see if either one is clogged with dust. The 2600XT is known to get that way... If you can snag a 5770 for your Mac pro or a GTX 680 at a good price that might tide you over for now

well, I tried

John B

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Answer 3

Aug 10, 2015 9:48 AM in response to Johnb-one

Hi John,

Thanks for making the effort as it looks you were doing this quite blind (in the sense of you not not being able to speak from experience because you do not have the same equipment). I'll certainly look around for the video cards you mentioned.

Though, the GTX 680 requires 200W of power. I wonder if I can draw them from the Mac Pro's power supply as I already have 6 drives installed (5 normal ones and one SSD), plus the ATI 2600 which I need to keep installed in order to see the boot menu, a small USB PCI card and 8GB of RAM. For the 9600 GT I've already added one power adapter, but I probably will need two of those, and getting the one board connector wasn't easy - now I'd need another one. I wonder if there's a way to easily measure how much the current system is drawing already, to tell if there's still room.

You are mistaken on the way Bootcamp works, though, I believe. Boot camp is not a virtual box. It is just a set of drivers for Apple hardware plus an installer to make it possible to install Windows on a Mac (as most Macs don't have a DVD drive any more, for instance). Windows then gets installed on the Mac as if it's a regular PC. There is no OSX running in the background.

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