Fix: Far Cry 5 Crashing

Far cry 5 is an adventure-action shooter game which is developed by Ubisoft and is the 5^th installment of the Far cry series. It is one of the most popular games of 2018 and is played around the world. Although it has moderate computer requirements, many mainstream PC’s and laptops can play the game with ease.

Despite regular patches being released to fix the gameplay and improve features, there are numerous players who report that Far cry 5 crashes either when on the loading screen or during gameplay. The reasons for these crashes are different ranging from outdated NVIDIA drivers to incorrect or too demanding gameplay settings. We will go through each one of them and see if any can fix the problem.

Note: Before you proceed, make sure that you have the latest patches installed. Far Cry 5 developers release several patches overtime to fix frequent problems occurring with the users.

Solution 1: Disabling Overclocking and SLI Technology

Overclocking is very common in the modern PC where the processor performs short bursts of computation for a small interval. During that interval, the CPU reaches its threshold temperature and the overclocking stops until the CPU is cooled again. There were numerous reports by users who indicated that disabling overclocking fixed their issue of the game crashing again and again. There were also indications that using one processor instead of 4 or 6 also improved the gameplay. Although these settings are meant to improve the quality of the game, here they seem to do the opposite.

SLI (scalable link interface) is a brand name for multi-GPU technology developed by NVIDIA where you can link two or more video cards together to produce a single output. It is similar to the GPU jobs being divided into two processors instead of one. According to users who were using the SLI technology, they reported that disabling SLI and using one GPU fixed the problem for them. This means that Far cry 5 isn’t designed to distribute the game job to more than one GPU.

Solution 2: Setting low graphics options

Each game comes with a control to set the quality of the game output i.e. graphics. If the game is set to much higher graphics than which the computer can handle, the game will crash inevitably. We can set the graphics to low and see if this smoothens the gameplay and reduce the number of crashes happening.

1. Open Far Cry 5 and open the menu. Now click Options from the menu.

2. Now from the preceding menu, click on Video.

3. Click on the Monitor tab from the near top of the screen and set the Window mode to Windowed mode. Also, change the resolution if need be.

4. Select the Quality tab and set the Graphics Quality to low.

5. Select the Advanced settings and make sure that V-Sync is set to Off.

6. Now restart your game properly and power cycle your PC as well. Try launching the game and see if the problem is solved.

Solution 3: Deleting Game Profile files

Each game has game files saved in the system. All the current configurations of the game are saved in it with the addition of the settings of the user. Whenever the game boots up, these files are accessed to load all the initial configurations and settings. It is possible that these files are corrupt or have some discrepancies. We can try deleting them and see if this fixes the game crashing issue.

1. Navigate to the path “Documents > My Games > Far Cry 5”.
2. Delete (or cut paste somewhere else) the files “check.txt” and “gameprofile.txt”.
3. Restart your computer completely and check if this fixed the problem.

Solution 4: Tweaking Gameplay settings and changing .cfg

Ubisoft officially acknowledged the problem of Far Cry 5 crashing and released a set of checks to ensure when playing the game. These are more like ‘checks’ to ensure that the game is running in optimal conditions and have all the settings set. Make sure these conditions are true in your case.

1. Set all the graphics options to Low.
2. The Desktop color depth must be set to True Color (32-bit).
3. Make sure that all the virtual drive programs (such as Alcohol 120%, Daemon Tools, CloneCD, Nero etc.) are completely disabled. You should also always ensure that all virtual drives are unmounted and are disabled. It is best to uninstall all these types of programs.

Ubisoft also talked about the .cfg file. Cfg files are also called a configuration file and are used for storing settings and game parameters in a file so the game can access them even after it has shut down. We will make some changes in the .cfg file and see if this helps our cause.

1. Navigate to .cfg file of your Far Cry 5 folder in your computer (it’s usually in this path: C:\Program Files\Ubisoft\Crytek\Far Cry).
2. Right-click on the file click Open with > Notepad.
3. Now make the following changes to the configuration file:

r_WaterReflections = “0”

e_overlay_geometry = “0”

r_WaterRefractions = “0”

4. Save all the changes in your computer and perform a power cycle. Now try launching the game and see if the crashes still occur.

Solution 5: Updating/rolling back Graphics drivers

Graphics card manufacturers roll our frequent updates to include more features and reduce bugs all the time. You should explore the internet, google your hardware and see if there are any available drivers for you to install. Either this or you can let Windows automatically update them for you. Nevertheless, a little research might make the troubleshooting easier for you.

Furthermore, if updating the drivers don’t work for you, you should consider rolling back the drivers to a previous build. It is not a surprise to know that newer drivers are sometimes not stable or conflict with the operating system.

Note: There were several indications that NVIDIA’s latest drivers were not compatible with the game. Try rolling back and see if this does the trick.

1. Install the utility Display Driver Uninstaller. You can continue without this step but this ensures that there are no remnants of the drivers.
2. After installing Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU), launch your computer in safe mode. You can learn how to boot your computer into safe mode by reading our article on it.
3. After booting your computer into safe mode, launch the application which was just installed.
4. After launching the application, select the first option “Clean and restart”. The application will then automatically uninstall the installed drivers and restart your computer accordingly.

5. Boot your computer into normal mode, press Windows + R, type “devmgmt.msc” in the dialogue box and press Enter. Most probably the default drivers will be installed. If not, right-click on any empty space and select “Scan for hardware changes”. Now try launching the game and see if the default drivers fix the crashing issue.
6. Now there are two options. Either you can search online for the latest driver available for your hardware from the manufacturer’s website such as NVIDIA etc. (and install manually) or you can let Windows install the latest version itself (search for updates automatically).
7. We will take a look at installing automatically. Right-click on your hardware and select “Update driver”. Select the first option “Search automatically for updated driver software”. Choose the second option if you are updating manually and select “Browse for driver” and navigate to the location where you downloaded.

8. Restart your computer after installing the drivers, launch the game and check if this solves the problem.

In addition to the above solutions, you can also try:

• Launching the game use GeForce Experience application.
• Installing the OS and the game in an SSD instead of normal hard drives.
• Turn V-Sync off and changed Field Of View Scaling to 80 and Resolution Scale to 0.7.
• Make sure no other third-party programs are running in the background which might conflict with the system.
• Disable all antivirus software
• Increase the limit of Virtual RAM being used.
• Try running the game as an administrator.