Crysis Warning

[Irwink!]

Anyone running Vista drooling in anticipation of picking up Crysis when it hits store shelves on Friday be forewarned. I pre-ordered it for download as was able to fire it up today. Having d/loaded the demo and run it both under XP and Vista I was betting the release would be pretty much the same performance wise. It is.

With all the eye candy turned on under Vista it is crippled when things get busy. Even just running your character through the terrain when things AREN'T busy reveals a very detectable slow framerate. This is on a machine with an e6700, 4gb ram, 2-320mb 8800gts in sli, nforce chipset tuned for best performance, unnecessary processes and services killed, no a/v, no defender, blah, blah, blah.

Under XP on the same rig the game sails along on highest settings with anti-aliasing turned on. Granted, "very high" graphics mode is not available but there is a tweak out for the demo that still works in the release that gets you pretty close to the "very high" graphics mode under Vista/DX-10 without the crippled performance.

 Oh yeah, under either os the game runs best at 1024x768 res. Anything higher and things really sloooow down. So much for the big deal DX-10 game.

[Skuzzy]

Did you load the 'Crysis' special video drivers NVidia released?  Just curious.

[Irwink!]

The only Nvidia drivers I loaded were 163.75 drivers dated 11/7. Supposedly they were opimized for Crysis. They did stop some intermittent crashes I had running the demo. After seeing the release the demo is almost exactly the same as the first few checkpoints in the game.

Admittedly I haven't scoured the internet looking for drivers. If you are aware of some that are supposed to be better I'll try them. I'm actually more interested in the comparative performance between XP and Vista than the actual game. The game is still cool though. At the moment I'm totally satisfied playing it under XP.

[moot]

Crytek or EA had said they found Vista performance faster than XP's, but this was proven false the day the demo came out.
Some new drivers did come out on the 11th.

There's some pretty extensive optimization guides, like this one.  There's commands for just about everything in the game.

[Blank]

dont forget to disable the Aero interface

My findings with the Demo (game ordered after playing)

Base system : No Overclocking
Vista home premium 32bit, - fresh install just for game as i use XP for normal work and life (dual boot)
C2D e6700,
2gb ram (900mhz),  
1x Asus 8800 gts 640mb
Mobo Asus P5N32-e SLi

Nvidia beta drivers for crysis = big improvement.

to show fps in game type into console =  r_DisplayInfo=1

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Trying to run as good DX10 as possible:

I edited the .cfg file for postprocesses and set motionblur=0  (Disabled)
set FSAA = 0  (in set up screen)

or enable the console with:  con_resricted=0  (i think)
r_FSAA=0
r_MotionBlur=0

1440x900 res

running all at 'very high' except objects set to 'high'

average fps = 30  (which is really not ideal but looks pretty)

the fps killers in the set up screen are 'objects' and 'Post processes' set thes lower for for the big, well more noticable fps increases.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Running at dx9 settings all 'high' no problems at all on xp,

Looking as CPU loading whilst playing both cores running aroun 30%-40%



After all my fiddling with the game i came to the conclusion are:

To actually play the game at this time I'm sticking with XP and DX9 at high settings unless something amazing has happend optimisation wise with the retail version.

People may moan "why cant i play on very high with  my Uber Rig Waa Waa" but remember Crytek (the makers of Crysis) are probably hopeing to make more money off the sale/licensing of its "Cryengine2" to 3rd party developers, and to me it seems the engine is going to tax PC's for some time yet and as such as good bet when choosing you game engine.

Hope this info helps in some way

Blank

[0thehero]

This is on a machine with an e6700, 4gb ram, 2-320mb 8800gts in sli, nforce chipset tuned for best performance, unnecessary processes and services killed, no a/v, no defender, blah, blah, blah.

SLI has documented problems in Crysis right now, under either XP or Vista.  Patch is supposed to be forthcoming from nVidia.  Performance under Vista x64 is reportedly up to 15% better than either XP or Vista 32-bit.

The demo ran pretty smoothly on my system (Opteron 185@3GHz, 2GB RAM, 8800GTX, Vista Ultimate) at 1920x1200 with all settings to High and 4X AA, though I admit I was somewhat bummed that the game wouldn't play acceptably at Very High.  Still, there's so much potential with the game engine the mod possibilities are exciting.

Vietnam LRRP mods, anyone?

[Irwink!]

I wound up getting nvidia forceware 169.09 beta drivers for Crysis today. They were only posted two days ago. To repeat, everything unessential is turned off/disabled including Aero. I read the Tweakguides file a week or so ago right after I got the demo. Latest sound driver, yada, yada.

The beta drivers gave me a slight performance boost over what I originally reported with all settings on Very High. It's still not enough for me to actually play it under Vista so I'm going to stop messing with it and just enjoy the game running it in XP.

My main reason for posting originally was to warn off those people with oem Vista boxes that are apt to be very disappointed after they've plunked down the cash for the game. As it is it's like deja vu for me going back to when I first ran Far Cry. I never did get what I considered acceptable performance out of it on the original box I installed it on.