Crysis

[Space Goat]

I just played Crysis for a while, and on my machine, it runs quite smoothly in DX10 mode at very high settings using a resolution of 1280 x 800 with no AA. This is without installing the new NVidia driver or doing any tweaks.

As for the gameplay, it's like Far Cry on steroids. The nanosuit serves as an interesting wrinkle, but most of the time, I'm leaving on armor mode and engaging in standard firefights. I'm not knocking these, because they can be quite fun with trees and buildings collapsing all around you!

[MGM]

I played the game and set everything to Very High with no AA and 1680x1050. I got about 12-17 fps (with an average of about 15) throughout (and even less during the first cutscene). I tried setting a few options to just High but it only rose about 1-2 fps. I changed my resolution to 1440x900 and got about 16-23 fps (with an average of about 20).

Still not good enough, imo. I currently have the latest nVidia BETA driver (the one made for this demo), a single GTX, 2GB RAM, a Q6600, and all at stock speeds and settings. I'm going to play around with it a bit more and see how it runs but I'm not expecting any major leaps unless some ungodly new drivers are released soon.

Btw, for those who don't know, the demo apparently doesn't utilize all of the power of a CPU due to time restrictions or something. The game thinks dual-core CPU's are single cores, and quad-core CPU's are dual-core. The final game will likely support all cores but I'm not sure how much of an impact this will have on the framerate.

MGM out

[Colonel Faultcheck]

Originally Posted by Koroush Ghazi

I think the issue of DX10 running slowly is a double-whammy effect. From what I understand (and yet to confirm personally in the demo, but it was the case in the beta), Crysis runs slower on Vista than XP in general even in DX9 mode, and then when you add Very High (i.e. DX10 mode) on top of that, it will run even more slowly.

Well, it's not much of a difference, on my machine anyway. Running the demo on both XP Pro and Vista, both 32 bit, I didnt see much of a difference. With settings on high and antialiasing at 4X I average around 20 fps in either OS.
I did not use the "optimized" driver for Vista but I did for XP, so if the driver provides a few more fps it seems as though it will be equal to that in XP. I did then change a few settings: Texture, Object, and Shader quality all to Medium and antialiasing to 2X showed a gain of around 15 or so fps. Note: I dont know if the antialiasing setting is "sticking", dont know if its being applied with the ingame option, keeps resetting to none. I really like the destructible environment, trees being cut down my a mounted mg, thats cool. I also ran the included benchmarks, a good way to see some info on how it is running. They are in:C:\Program Files\Electronic Arts\Crytek\Crysis SP Demo\Bin32 for a default install, files named Benchmark_CPU.bat and Benchmark_GPU.bat.
Screen shots are from Vista, I do think it looks better in Vista.

[el badman]

Still not good enough, imo. I currently have the latest nVidia BETA driver (the one made for this demo), a single GTX, 2GB RAM, a Q6600, and all at stock speeds and settings. I'm going to play around with it a bit more and see how it runs but I'm not expecting any major leaps unless some ungodly new drivers are released soon.

Kinda scary
I thought I'd be safe with my rig playing it in 1680x1050 but I guess I'm not. Well, I'm almost done downloading it, so I guess we'll see soon...

[MGM]

After cleaning my system for a bit and doing a reinstall of the driver (but first, clearing out my previous drivers) I was able to get the game to run around 20 fps for everything maxed, 1680x1050. It was a bit playable, and the slowdown isn't really noticeable.

However, if you turn down either Post Processing (to High instead of Very High, which affects the depth of field and motion blur, I noticed that the motion blur for turning is about half of what it was when this was set to Very High) or Shaders (which apparently affects explosions, smoke, and other specific DX10 stuff, but I didn't really get to test this out), then the game will jump up to about 30 fps on 1680x1050 with everything else maxed.

I'm currently playing around with a suggestion I heard that if we turn nhancer's settings for "Quality" instead of "High Quality" then the game jumps up a bit in frames but the quality doesn't suffer much if at all. Not sure how to test this one out to tell you the truth.

Another thing I heard is that if we turn off Gamma Correction for AA then we'll get a boost in fps. I checked my nvidia cp and it is indeed on but I have yet to turn it off. I'll do so now and let you know what I find.

EDIT: It seems the Gamma Correction bit didn't really do anything, and the nvidia setting was already at Quality and there was no "High Quality" ... I did find an option to change Texture Quality but that was also already set to Quality, although this one did have a High Quality setting.

Looks like I'm going to wait and see what Koroush says about the Post Processing and Shaders bits. I'd love to see some comparison shots of these settings on High and Very High to see which one matters more in the overall look of the game...

MGM out

[Klules]

Agree with you Badman. I built my new rig with the thought that I could realize the full potential of all games out there. Still, it's good to think that there are a few games out there which we can all measure by. I'm eagerly waiting to get back home and play this. Right now I'm in the mountains trying to teach my daughter about nature (and trying to get an appreciation for it myself.)

[Colonel Faultcheck]

You've got to try out the Sandbox! Its the first time I ever played with something like this. Well, you can try out lots of features not in the demo. Fly a chopper, drive a tank or an attack ship or hovercraft. It seems to include some different maps to play with. I have some screenshots of some of the vehicles. I drove them all too, the chopper seems very easy to fly, dont know if this will be how it is in the final release but it would seem so. The tank with the strange cannon is a "gauss" tank, dont know what it does exactly though. A gauss ship too. To check this out see this thread at incrysis.com. Yes, I know, my vehicle placement needs work

[im_thelumberjack]

I am actually fairly surprised how reasonable it is running. Max at 1280x1024 no AA I am getting about 20fps (ranges from 16-40) at 1600x1200 I drop to 15fps (range from 13-30) and at high (1280x1024) with DX10 I get almost 40 (over twice what I was getting in the beta). It should be even more impressive once it utilizes more than one core and uses 64bit threading. I was originally worried that I wouldn't be able to play the full game with high settings but now I believe I will be able to play it at max pretty decently.

[Koroush Ghazi]

OK gentlemen, I've had some time to play around with the demo, though it's only been an hour, I've got some useful info and a lot of detailed screenshots and videos to share, so saddle up for a long post/mini-review


Gameplay

Let's start with the gameplay - I have to say it's superb, in the tradition of Far Cry. Although you're moving from set objective to objective, you have a lot of freedom in determining how you get there, and how you interact with the environment and the enemy. You can use stealth, brute force, etc. The enemy AI in particular seems fantastic. They don't stupidly overlook you just because you're a bit further away, and even when you cloak in front of them, they don't suddenly scratch their heads - they fire at your last location and keep hunting for you intelligently. They also seem quite "alive" - I felt a little guilty running down some of them, but that's as much to do with the graphics as the AI. All up, I definitely think Crysis won't disappoint in the gameplay department, though it's not a literary masterpiece.


Graphics/Performance

This is the heart of Crysis, the reason why everyone has expected it for so long. I'm happy to say that the graphics really do wow me, even though I played the Crysis MP beta. They're appropriately beautiful, and definitely next-gen. The SP version has much richer environments, and the graphics look a touch better than the MP beta, but it's pretty much the same. Again, I believe everything looks phenomenal, but it depends on what settings you run.

I'm running at 1280x1024, All High (maximum in DX9 mode), 0xAA in Windows XP (Vista details further below), using the 169.01 drivers on an 8800GTS 640MB, 2GB RAM, X2 4400+ all at stock speeds, and my FPS varies from around 20-35FPS+, usually sitting around the 25-30 mark. I find it incredibly smooth, absolutely no stuttering or major FPS dips. In fact the performance is slightly better than the beta, especially since in the beta there were no destructible environments for example. Also the lack of AA really isn't visible to me, everything looks very smooth.

To demonstrate both performance and image quality, I've prepared a very large number of screenies from a variety of areas, both during action and also in complex scenes, showing distance and also up-close details - the FPS is shown at the top right of each screenshot.








Very rarely if ever does the FPS dip below 20, and it's perfectly smooth and very playable, so I'm extremely happy. However I suspect this has to do with the extra VRAM on my 8800GTS 640MB, and as others have indicated, less VRAM may mean having to reduce texture settings for example to get things smooth.

Update: My Vista DX10 screenshots, as well as XP vs. Vista DX9 and DX10 comparisons are here.

To demonstrate the gameplay, the environments and effects, and also how smooth things are, I've uploaded a couple of YouTube Videos:

General Gameplay: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJbUIGgmjnE
General Gameplay: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmW71f7hTVg
Destructible Vegetation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SkXuoElvXY

Note that of course when recording with FRAPS there is a reduction in FPS, and in this case the FPS was almost halved in some cases, though still looks relatively smooth despite that. The high quality versions of those videos are also available - check the video info box of each one on YouTube for links.


Note further that I don't believe this rumor that the game isn't detecting or using both cores on dual cores. If you open the in-game console just at startup, and use the Page Up key to scroll up to the top of the console text, you'll see that it seems to correctly detect how many logical cores your CPU has - in my case it specifically says it's found and is using 2 logical cores (both in XP and Vista). I also took this screenshot of CPU usage during some combat, and although it's not high, it's clearly using more than one core, otherwise total CPU usage would be capped at 50%:




Tweaking


Update: Full 13-page Crysis Tweak Guide now available.



I haven't had too much of a chance to get into the tweaking yet, but here are some initial details which will help people.

To open the in-game console, press the ~ key, and you can use a range of commands there. Try the ones on this page of the Far Cry tweak guide.

For example to check your FPS, type r_displayinfo 1 in the console.

There are a range of config files under the \Program Files\Electronic Arts\Crytek\Crysis SP Demo\Game\Config\CVarGroups directory, but I don't recommend editing these. Instead they're worth examining for useful commands, and in particular each file corresponds to your in-game settings of the same name. For example the file sys_spec_PostProcessing.cfg shows what commands are applied at each level of the Post Processing in-game setting. E.g. at [2] (which is Medium), you can see that Motion Blur is off (=0), but at [3] (High), r_motionblur=1 means that it's enabled. At [4], r_motionblur has a value of 3, meaning it's more intense. So clearly you can adjust the intensity of motionblur from a range of 0 to 3, possibly higher.

If you then want to add/customize the commands in a personal config file, the way to do it is to create a file called System.cfg, and place it under your \Program Files\Electronic Arts\Crytek\Crysis SP Demo directory. Now within this file, you can add various commands, for example if you want to keep your Post Processing at High in the game, but just disable motion blur, then enter the following in System.cfg:

r_MotionBlur=0


Finally, to disable the intro movies, go to your \Program Files\Electronic Arts\Crytek\Crysis SP Demo\Game\Localized\Video directory, and rename all the .sfd files (e.g. to ._sfd), except bg.sfd which is the main in-game menu background. This skips all the movies and gets straight to the menu much faster.

Update: More advanced tweaks, as well as all the console/cfg commands are here

Update 2: Setting Very High in XP, instructions + comparison screenshots here

I will of course investigate the tweaks and settings in the coming days, but I'm going to do it slowly and methodically, so it may take a few days. Stay tuned

[Danny]

An update on my performance, i rebooted and started the game using very high on everything, but high on object detail and shader level - game was very playable with just a bit of stuttering once you load a savegame.

Just remember that all veryhigh might very well kill your fps. Again I noticed just having 'shader quality' and 'post processes' both on very high (with rest on low!) will kill your fps. And as post process on anything but veryhigh disables the sunbeams on trees in front of the sun, i recommend lowering the shader quality instead.

And i really think people should try DX10 out. Even though DX9 is very pretty, DX10 is what you want because the extra graphics are just that much better. For the first time i actually see a diffrence between DX9 and DX10.

I am, however, considering upgrading to 3gb of RAM or even 4gb for this