Fixing a Direct3D9 bug in Far Cry (2018)

Summary

TL;DR - if you are not interested in an in-depth overview of what was wrong with the game and how it was fixed, just follow the link to check out a concise changelog and grab SilentPatch for Far Cry: Download SilentPatch for Far Cry Upon downloading, all you need to do is to extract the archive to game’s directory and that’s it! Overview Far Cry (developed by Crytek) once a game considered an example of visual fidelity and de facto a benchmark of then-modern PCs, turns out not to be free of issues. The main issue bothering people for years were broken water reflections - landmass would not reflect on water if the game is played on anything newer than Windows XP: You can see trees and rocks are reflecting fine - but bigger chunks of land are not, so reflections look far less impressive than they do on XP! Community has since found a way to fix this issue - it is possible to use WineD3D, a Direct3D to OpenGL wrapper for Windows, and then everything looks fine. However, it comes at a price – performance can be lowered by as much as 75%! That can result in unacceptable framerates even on modern PCs. Can we do better? Of course! Research Of course, as with any graphical related issues, usage of PIX graphics debugger could not be overstated. For starters, I captured several frames on both Windows 10 and Windows XP virtual machine. Nothing seemed out of place – XP frames indeed display correctly, while Win10 frames display with a bug. However, one test proved this issue to be much weirder than anyone could have guessed. I attempted to capture a frame on a XP virtual machine, and then preview it on Windows 10. This didn’t have a very high chance of succeeding, since PIX frames are strictly bound to user’s current GPU and drivers – so previewing captures from different PCs is not always possible. However, in this case it worked and revealed something bizarre… That’s how a texture for water reflections displays when previewed in PIX on Windows XP: Compare it with the very sam...