Crysis demo

[DRuM]

I finally decided to download the demo yesterday. Only 2 years late...
Anyway, it was only really to test my new pc since it still seems to be the benchmark game for testing performance. As it happens, the game is great, think I'll have to buy it. I'm just curious if anyone would know why my framerate was low yesterday, but much higher today, on the same settings. Yesterday I was averaging 21fps, and today about 36fps. This is on 1920x1080 and everything on HIGH settings. My pc consists of phenom II 550@3.1Ghz, HD4870 1GB, 4GB DDR2, and windows 7 x64. What happened was, today I decided to see if I could run it on VERY HIGH settings at same res, and yes, it runs ok, but with some considerable drop in framerate. Then I put everything to medium settings to see what kind of fps I'd get and how it would look. Framerate of course went up much higher into the 50s. Then I put it back to HIGH and suddenly I'm getting a higher framerate than I had before all the setting changes. I'm very happy with the way the game runs, very smooth. What do you think could have happened here? Someone suggested to me that the demo might have forgotten to turn some details back on, such as shadow resolution, after switching from medium back to high settings. But it all looks good to me, so I don't know. I've taken these 3 screenshots at 1920x1080 high settings, can you tell if anything is missing that should be there on high settings? Screenshots are 5.93mb each, don't blame you if you don't download them, but figured high res screenshots might be needed. Cheers.

[Bacon]

Not really sure but I know for a fact the demo is fucked and you'll get better framerates with the retail version of the game, I had the demo, ran like garbage, bought the game and it ran pretty alright after that, probably 1.5x the speed the demo did

Oh, and don't get your hopes up about how good the game is, the first one is O.K. (Actually pretty good if it's your first playthrough) but the expansion pack is pretty much the same game, but with fewer missions, theres no replay value whatsoever in the single player and the multiplayer is very dull and slow paced, probably because of the lack of people playing it.

[DRuM]

Not really sure but I know for a fact the demo is fucked and you'll get better framerates with the retail version of the game, I had the demo, ran like garbage, bought the game and it ran pretty alright after that, probably 1.5x the speed the demo did

Wow, really? Good to know. Tbh, after all the hype about how difficult a game it is to run, I was expecting disaster. Most people say 30fps is good for smooth gameplay, and most of the time I'm getting over that, although I'm also going slightly under it at times. But there's nothing to make it stutter, very smooth indeed. So if the full game runs it better, I could perhaps be looking at nearer to a constant 40fps.

Btw, someone just told me that the reason I had such a difference in framerate from yesterday to today is that there's a bug in the ati 4870 (my card) and the 9600GT, where it'll sometimes lag until you quit and restart.

So is crysis still the toughest game to run? In other words, since I can run it pretty well, does that mean no other game will challenge my rig as much? Or, what about crysis warhead, is that the same system requirement? How about modern warfare 2, is that more intensive?

[Bacon]

Crysis has to be by far the most CPU/GPU intesive game i've ever ran or played or have seen to date, i mean, on the most ultimate graphical settings, etc. Even games that are recently coming out still don't reqire as much power as it, but i'm not sure if that's because the game looks better or it's more advanced, or its because of the ract its rendering out every single tree / bush / whatever you can see across the island, not too sure.

tl;dr : yes, it requires probably the most power out of a computer than most if not any games to date, but once again, I could be wrong so don't just take my word for it. Gamecube / Wii Emulation doesen't count, but that's the only other kind of "games" i can think of on the computer that need that much power. If you really want to test your rig, playing something like super mario galaxy or metroid prime 3 would be a good way to give it a workout...

Also, turn down the shadow detail if you don't care about how detailed they are, makes the game run a little nicer.

[U4EA]

Yea, so true Bacon. My machine is nothing special, but I've still been able to run all recent games from the past 1-2 years on 1680x1050 with max settings and 8-16x AA. I tried the same with Crysis and was sad to see it stutter quite a bit. I then changed it from "Very High" down to just "High" and that improved performance by a lot.

It is a very good looking game without a doubt, but it's hard to tell whether this is all because the engine was ahead of its time or simply because it's not very well optimized.

[DRuM]

Thanks bacon. Got another question.
Fraps works perfectly showing the framerate overlay and taking screenshots and movies in all games.... except crysis. I've also just now configured rivatuner to show my gpu temp as an overlay in games >>

and that works perfectly in all games....... except crysis! What gives? Is it because I have the pre release demo and not the full version or is crysis just bullet proof to 3rd party apps?

[Bacon]

It is a very good looking game without a doubt, but it's hard to tell whether this is all because the engine was ahead of its time or simply because it's not very well optimized.

Probably both, lol

And DRuM... No idea why Fraps is doing that but it could be the demo, like I said, its fucked compared to the retail version.. I can't remember Crysis "blocking" 3rd party programs like Fraps, but it could be like U4EA suggested and the games coding is sloppy or something, not allowing fraps to properly count the framerate... or something

Last time I recorded a video on the game with fraps I had no problems with video / wrong framerate in the counter, so it's probably the demo

[Silicone_Milk]

I haven't tried Crysis but most modern games run at at least 30 fps on my system (AMD x64 4200+ , dual 7300 GT running in SLi, 2 gigs of DDR2 667)

I run at 1024 x 768 resolution though. I only consider 640 x 480 and lower low :P

I think it's about time for an upgrade.

[DRuM]

Thanks bacon, yeah, if I get the full game, it'll be interesting to see if fraps works and if framerate is higher.
Silicon_Milk, it was only a few weeks ago on my old pc I used to think 1024 was quite high, as I used to run all my games on that, and my desktop was always at 800x600

Didn't gonnafistya work on crysis? Maybe he'd know about fraps if he sees this.

[Silicone_Milk]

it's funny because I run all of my games at 1024 x 768 but my desktop is 1280 x 1024 (Substituting for the fact that I don't have the multi-lcd setup I use at work when programming)