Topic: Crysis and DX10 (56k warn, but worth it)

[Pugnate]

I hope this is true. Even though I am dual booting, switching to Vista is frustrating.

I have World in Conflict installed on XP, even though it apparently has better visuals on Vista. I haven't played Bioshock because it is on Vista and not XP.

One thing is that I've found Vista to be more stable and run games better -- strangely enough.

The problem is that my Asus WiFi application doesn't work OK with Vista, and since my comp works as the Access Point for my sister's comp, it is a problem.

[scottws]

I switched to Vista x64.  It's not bad.  Definitely has more problems than my XP install did, but I haven't had any trouble getting any of my devices or games working.

[Quemaqua]

Sellouts.

[scottws]

I only did it because I have 4GB of RAM and Windows XP x86 was only detecting 2.9GB.  I liked XP, but I've heard nothing but bad things about XP x64 so I went with Vista.

[Pugnate]

And I am dual booting. Plus mine is 'acquired'.

[scottws]

Ok, so I installed the Crysis demo and played it a bit.  The FarCry engine was so drop-dead gorgeous yet ran so well.  Crytek promised the same thing with the engine in Crysis, but it is just not the case.  Honestly, I find HL2 or Doom III better looking at the settings I'm able to get Crysis to run at an acceptable frame rate.  There is tons of draw-in and for some reason I feel like the jungle looked better in FarCry.  Maybe it's just my settings (all medium).  I don't know.

As far as the gameplay, it's basically FarCry with the twist that you have special powers and the environments are more destructible.

[scottws]

This article basically confirms that performance sucks in DX10 right now.  I either have to run it DX9 mode or get a Geforce 8800 GTX.

http://www.techspot.com/article/73-crysis-performance/

It's fine if the highest graphics capabilities aren't available yet in the game, but I think it sucks that when you run the game at settings that allow you to play it right now, it looks worse than games that came out a couple years ago.

[Pugnate]

That's pretty screwed up that it would be DX10 performance that was problematic and not DX9. Crysis is the showcase for DX10 basically...

So I hope they sort this out before the retail release. Have you tried a lower resolution? Maybe the video memory is the bottleneck?

[scottws]

That analysis I posted basically said the game should be fine to play at high settings using DX9 on my system at 1680x1050, but DX10 would be poor even on medium.

[gpw11]

I'm personally not all that impressed with it.  My cards obviously a bit weak to fully take advantage of it, but even taking that into account it just kind of came off as bland in both visuals and game play.  I did, however, try it right after Bioshock, which may not be as technically impressive, but is about a thousand times more visually appealing because of the art design.  The power system is cool though, and I imagine I'll try it out after I upgrade my card in a bit.

[Pugnate]

This isn't good!

[gpw11]

Well, I could be wrong about it, I didn't give it that much of a chance.

[scottws]

No I agree.  I have a decent card but can't run on high settings.  On medium settings, it looks like a 3 year old game and even then doesn't run all that well.

I did try to go back and run the game in DX9 on high settings, but performance was just as bad as in DX10 mode.

I was much more impressed with FarCry when it came out because the visuals were incredible with very good performance to go along with it.  There is none of that here.

[idolminds]

Kind of a related topic, someone wrote this on Slashdot (regarding a $500 PC upgrade):

Developers seem to develop games specifically to overwhelm the top machines available today. It's like they all have this insane mindset that people are still going to be playing these games 2 or 3 years from now when the majority of consumers actually have PCs capable of running these games at full detail. The problem is, that the life-cycle of a game doesn't go much beyond 6 months, and that's even for a good one. So what's the point?

I keep hearing that they are "future-proofing" Crysis, so it'll still look great 5 years from now. Thats great and all, but this guy is right. No one will really care. Unless the game gets a large online following or a strong modding community, by next year it'll be uninstalled. Then it'll just be a curiosity when people upgrade, something they install just to see how it looks with the graphics turned up...then uninstalled to make room for their newest game purchase.

That is one good thing about console hardware. Developers cant rely on future hardware upgrades to make their game run faster. Make it look good and make it run well NOW, on current hardware.

[MysterD]

I guess this is why the newest NVidia "Crysis" Drivers are called "BETA" Drivers....

[gpw11]

Well, it does make sense for them to do so, seeing as they are trying to sell the engine to developers as much as they're trying to sell the actual game to us.  That said, it's still kind of a bullshit practice, but the only way it will stop is if people stop buying games that are released for systems that aren't even on the market yet.

the problem here is that these are the same people who upgrade at least once a year and spend hundreds of dollars on watercooling systems in order to milk about $20 worth of extra performance out of their systems.  It's not going to happen.

[gpw11]

I've changed my mind - it can be really fun.  Especially if you pretend you're The Predator.

[Pugnate]

Developers seem to develop games specifically to overwhelm the top machines available today. It's like they all have this insane mindset that people are still going to be playing these games 2 or 3 years from now when the majority of consumers actually have PCs capable of running these games at full detail. The problem is, that the life-cycle of a game doesn't go much beyond 6 months, and that's even for a good one. So what's the point?

That is pretty shortsighted. It isn't about making money off the first game that the developers make on that engine, but rather the money that comes when other developers lease that engine.

Take a look at some of the gorgeous looking games that were made on the Unreal and Quake III engine years years after release.

Furthermore what game aside from Crysis is out to rape your system? That is a myth.

And just take a look at the gorgeous visuals the new Unreal engine provides. Plus how about the many sexy titles we have because of, like Gears of War and Rainbow Six Vegas to name a few.

As long as visuals scale well, I am all for it.

[Xessive]

I agree with Pug and I'd like to add that there has to be a balance between visual quality and performance. If there are detailed scaling options (i.e. the way Oblivion can be scaled to balance out quality vs performance) then all the better. I guess what makes developing for PC's more challenging is that not everyone ahs the same machine, so conflicts are inevitable.


There are games that don't look appealing and perform unimpressively e.g. Deus Ex Invisible War. Which in my mind is inexcusable. If you're going to compromise visuals then the performance has to be amazing.

[Pugnate]

Yea I have to say that Oblivion is a prime example in terms of scaling. You could customize anything, and it would look beautiful on most video cards.

There are games that don't look appealing and perform unimpressively e.g. Deus Ex Invisible War. Which in my mind is inexcusable. If you're going to compromise visuals then the performance has to be amazing.

Yup.

I hope they sort this Crysis thing out soon. IGN said even back at E3 that Crysis wasn't performing well.

[scottws]

I think it's funny because there is a quote from Crytek earlier in this thread that they are developing the game with 2 year old PCs in mind.  Yeah right!  There is no way this game would run and be playable on a 2 year old PC.

[gpw11]

Well, that's the thing - the Crisis demo doesn't really seem to scale all that well.  You essentially have the option of making it look mediocre and being borderline playable, looking good and running slow, or looking great and running horrible.  The problem is that at the lower settings it still doesn't really run all that well when it should. 

As for quotes from Crytech...the article Scott posted linked to another article with some quotes from them.  CPU bound?  WTF?  Why would you even blatantly lie about that? For some reason it makes me think that they're Russian and they're up to something shady that no one else can figure out because you'd have to be a corrupt Russian to even think of it.

[scottws]

Well, that's the thing - the Crisis demo doesn't really seem to scale all that well.  You essentially have the option of making it look mediocre and being borderline playable, looking good and running slow, or looking great and running horrible.  The problem is that at the lower settings it still doesn't really run all that well when it should.

See, that's the thing that gets me.  I'd love to run it with very high or high details on my system, but that just isn't reality.

So I'd like to be able to get visuals on par with say DOOM III or HL2 out of the game with decent performance.  I get 100-120 fps on ET:QW at 1680x1050 with details on high and 8x anisotropic filtering.  The game looks awesome and runs great.

I probably get 25-30 fps in Crysis on medium details.  The game both looks and runs like shit.

As for quotes from Crytech...the article Scott posted linked to another article with some quotes from them.  CPU bound?  WTF?  Why would you even blatantly lie about that? For some reason it makes me think that they're Russian and they're up to something shady that no one else can figure out because you'd have to be a corrupt Russian to even think of it.

I found the following in the article you are talking about:

As for the ongoing DX9 v DX10 shenanigans, Yerli reckons that DX10 in single player will only provide mere graphical niceties, whereas in multiplayer the more advanced graphics and rendering will allow for a truly next-generation gaming experience that actually affects how you play. The proof of the pudding, then, will be in the playing.

WTF is that supposed to mean?  How?

[gpw11]

Haha.  Dude, seriously, they say something fucking retarded in every interview.

[Quemaqua]

There are a variety of reasons why I have no interest in this and haven't since it was announced, but the list seems to be growing rather more than I anticipated.

[scottws]

I liked FarCry a lot and was actually hotly anticipating Crysis.  Now I've pretty much decided not to bother until I get a chance to upgrade my video card.

[idolminds]

WTF is that supposed to mean?  How?

There will be DX10 and DX9 servers. If you have DX10 you can play in either, but certain things will be disabled (like shooting down trees). If you run in DX9 you will not be able to join DX10 servers.

No...not really sure why this is. Things like shooting down trees is available in DX9 and DX10, but only DX10 can do it in multiplayer.


And to go with something along the lines of the difference between high end ad low end. It would be nice if more attention was given to how the low end looks. My big problem is how games create the low end textures. They just scale down the texture using some mipmap level or something and it turns into blurry shit. Cant we get some proper texture scaling? Perhaps include a utility that you can run at install that will cleanly resize the textures? Perfect example was HL2, I turned the textures to low and you couldnt make out anything. Blurry and really shitty. Yet I run something like Quake 3 or whatever at a high framerate and the textures actually look great despite their lower resolution.

Its almost like instead of scaling the textures down in dimensions to fit in memory, they just increase the compression and it looks like hell. In fact, now that I've said it...thats probably exactly whats going on. Imagine taking a 1600x1200 image and getting its filesize down to 30k. You can either scale it down to 640x480, and it'll look nice, or you can just boost the jpeg compression without shrinking it, and it'll look like crap.

NWN had the option of installing high res or low res textures, and I thought that was neat instead of letting the engine butcher them down to size.

[gpw11]

That shooting down trees thing is kind of cool.  I've twice accidentally shot a tree down on myself now.

[Pugnate]

And that wasn't even in Crysis!

I am considering cancelling my preorder. I will probably do that and then just go for it if the game reviews well.

[gpw11]

What wasn't in Crysis? 

Anyways, like I said: my opinion has totally changed on the game (or at least the demo).  Yeah, it's not as great technically as I thought it would be, but it's insanely fun to sneak around in the jungle and fuck with really dumb people right before you kill them. There's a ton of cool stuff you can do, and I'm sure you of all people will be able to handle the graphics options Pug.  But then again, it seems pretty apparent we'll be dealing with more monsters in the game as well....

[Pugnate]

...you clumsily shooting down a tree that landed on you.

Also I heard the A.I. is really bad? That would be a pity considering how decent it was in Far Cry.

[gpw11]

Uh, but it is in Crysis....that's where this went down.

Anyways, I don't know if you should scratch that pre-order or not.  If you do, can you still get the game the day it is out should reviews be good?  Like I said, I don't think it's very technically efficient, but I've been having fun with it after trying it out again. I never played much of Far Cry, but it's fucking rad attracting guards near walls you're hiding behind and then punching through their shitty tin shack and head.  It's also great to run a security checkpoint in a hijacked trucked, roll out, shoot it and have it blow up - killing all the guards. 

But yeah, the AI is pretty bad in the demo.  Were you so inclined you can generally run into a little shanty shack town and just shoot everyone straight in the face while they either just stand in one spot and shoot at you or don't notice you shooting at them until you're about 3 feet away.  They don't seem to run any tactics or anything, although it doesn't seem as bad if you run into guys in the jungle.  Oh, and I seriously doubt the aliens/monsters/whatever have better AI.

I've read quite a few threads through gamefaqs and somethingawful.com and it seems this game is really polarizing (or at least the demo is).  Some claim that the demo doesn't have multi-threading enabled and weaker AI because of lower difficulty, but who knows?

[scottws]

Why would the demo not have multithreading?   That's just stupid.  It's just code.  If you are going to cut anything out in a demo it will be things that really have substance like hi-res textures and videos.