Far Cry 6 isn’t short of launch issues, from a CPU bottleneck that hinders performance, to a ludicrously demanding HD texture pack not loading parts of the world properly at 4K resolution. According to a Reddit post, it turns out Ubisoft Connect’s overlay might be linked to many of the problems that players are experiencing, and disabling it could help you boost fps without much of a trade-off.
User Contrabardus first disabled the overlay to avoid an intrusive low VRAM notification bug, but observes that their frame rate jumped from just short of 60fps on ultra settings with ray tracing options enabled and FidelityFX disabled to a healthy 70fps. Better yet, it stabilised Far Cry 6’s performance to avoid noticeable dips and stutters. A 16% jump in frame rate at this level is considerable, even if their rig runs an Nvidia RTX 3080 Ti graphics card alongside an AMD Ryzen 3950X gaming CPU.
There’s no guarantee that this method will solve all of your Far Cry 6 woes, but it’s certainly worth a shot if you’re not engaging in co-op multiplayer or the challenges that can earn you experience, money, and in-game items.
To disable Ubisoft Connect’s overlay, close any game you’re running and follow these steps:
- Open Ubisoft Connect
- Click the hamburger menu in the top left
- Select Options
- In the General tab, uncheck ‘enable in-game overlay for supported games’
- Restart Ubisoft Connect
The first time you boot Far Cry 6 after disabling the overlay, you’ll be stopped with a warning that some features will be disabled. If you don’t check the ‘do not show this message again’ box, you’ll be prompted with this every time you boot, but this does give you the chance to re-enable things quickly if you decide you want to play with a friend.
For the time being, we’re stuck with workarounds until Ubisoft patches the game up. Fortunately, for all its issues, it still runs relatively smoothly on modern hardware, and you don’t lose a great deal of fidelity by bumping Far Cry 6’s settings down a touch. If you’re still unsure whether you can run it, check out the Far Cry 6 system requirements over on PCGameBenchmark.
Special thanks to Twitter user, Chris Vinson, for chucking this fix our way.