Crysis graphics misunderstood?

Hi,

As of right now, Crysis is the best looking game. However, many people including myself want to run medium/high setting. However, the developer made a mistake by setting their standards too high. The developer informed the IGN that their medium setting should have been high and high should've been ultra high.

So next time you run CRYSIS in medium setting, know that your actually running it high.

 

not that they "made a mistake by setting their standards too high."

They [Crytek] made the mistake of not optimizing the coding for the game to fully utilize a system's hardware. You will notice that it utilizes 60-70% of a CPU (regardless if its a dual core or quad core), and the GPU took a few patches to even enable SLI.

Now look at another game, Unreal Tournament 3, which is fully optimized since Epic made sure to focus on not just the eye-candy, but the engine and coding to take advantage of even 64-cores (if you have it).. running each core at 100% and the full capability of the vidoecards.

With a mid range 8600M GT and a dual core, UT3 can be ran with full resolution and high settings perfectly.... while Crysis needs lower resolutions and medium settings.

... its all about the optimizations for hardware requirements.

I know... I beta'ed both games, Epic wanted and achieve the best coding to even support old ATI 9600 videocards, while EA pushed Crytek to prematurely release Crysis with eye-candy and unoptimized coding.

 

One has to look at the aspect that UT3 is a corridor shooter meanwhile Crysis is an open ended shooter. Reason why the game is so demanding is because the game used 8000 shaders, no other game uses so much shaders.

Also you can´t interact with the environment much in UT3 nor Gears of War (Which is UT3 engine)

 

The very fact that Crysis: Warhead is promising the same graphics with much better performance should be sign enough that the first game was poorly optimized and rushed out the door.

 

Sure one can debate the game was poorly optimized. Well was Far Cry poorly optimized when that game hit the door back in 2004? No one could max out Far Cry by then, so that must mean the game was poorly optimized right?. But one year later people could max it out, same with Crysis people can max it out today.

Everytime Crytek makes a new engine it is leaps ahead of games for a long time.

Check out these images from a mod for Far Cry original Cry engine. Looks better than most games today and this on a 2004 old engine.

http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-delta-sector/images

 

You all makes good points, but imo this is a never ending debate. It could be all of the above reasons or it could just one of the above, who knows? All it matters now is that Crytek is learning from their first installment by optimizing its expansion, Crysis:warhead.

 

Well thing is you can optimize the game yourself if you know how, it´s really easy just trial and error by making a config file or edit Cvars.

 

Crysis was very well optimised, sure the demo wasn't and the unpatched the game had a few annoying bugs but imo it if far beter optimised than the average game.

@gophyn: So because crysis doesn't run the cpu at 100% when it doesn't need it, you call that poor coding?
And because UT3 tells you it's running on high settings you think it's better than crysis on medium settings?
Should developers make all their games so they can be maxed out on a 8600 card?

 

I agree with both, UT3 vs Crysis is comparing Apples to Mutant Ninja Bunnies.

If you look around at any gven UT3 enviroment its the same ol' thing with some nicer textures and a few effects added. Mostly empty space and some walls and ground. Crysis is absolutly packed full of trees and bushes with insane amounts of detail, the clouds are actual poly's and not just pixels (if you have the right settings) and the level itself its one huge stage for most areas so it has to be rendering some of that stuff in the background to a small degree even if its not in your sight.

So even if you redesigned Crysis from the ground up with the UT3 engine it would be harder to run than UT3. Now that said Crysis could have been optimised better in some areas.

There are a ton of custom configs out there to proove it. Many of them offering you nearly the same or better visual quality as hte stock settings with better performance. This to me means that the engine is not totally bad but rather they did not have the power or time to tweak it to suite each system its played on. ATI cards may work with a config better than Nvidia and so on.

Now about Chaz's SLI comment this is even more so a problem with ATI to this day even after patches and with the newest ATI drivers crossfire simply does not work. I went thru Cryss 1920x1080 all Vhigh DX9 with dual 4850's thinking wow this game really is demading. Untill I went to do a single card benchmark one day to find that my fps in the game was the same!!!

But thats another good point, I was able to play the game just fine about 30fps average all very high DX9 in Vista with a single 4850 and thats a $200 card so thats not to bad if you really think about it. However in laptop land I am affraid we do not have any cheap options to play the game so well. I cant even manage all high on my new G50V or $1600 and while it runs great on medium it does not look like "crysis" and the graphics are really what make that game so appealing. I am having trouble enjoying it nearly as much on my laptop as I did my desktop. I cant wait till crossfire is fixed if ever so I can enjoy DX10 Very High or try some of those super ultra high custom configs.

 

The issue is that they're claiming the next game will run much better on weaker hardware. If they can get Warhead to run fine on an 8600 GT then why could they do the same for the first one?

The answer, of course, is that EA pressured them to release in time for the holidays. And now, rather than patching these engine optimizations into the current game (which they've admitted it possible), they're essentially abandoning it after less than a year in favor of the next one.

The other problem is that the game simply looks... well, ugly on lower settings. The thing doesn't scale well at all, and that's kind of a problem for a game riding on both its graphics and its ability to bring hardware falling to its knees.

 

Crysis did not (and still does not) take advantage of multi-cores (multi-threading), which is a same since so many people have them. CPU loads just float from one core to the other.

But to be honest, most current game do not either... although future games (some of which I am testing) are being developed for multi-threaded to utilize as many cores as you have. FYI, The Unreal Engine 3 can use up to 64 threads... thats 64-cores... insane.

If Crysis were to utilize all cores at 100% (with multi-threading), you would expect a better increase in FPS for physics and such...

As for making a game to support as many systems as possible... thats just good marketing and developing.... which Epic has been known for since their first Unreal games (like the original UT). They shoot for optimization so they can get as many gamers to play the game with good framerates and quality. Thats just good business.

Not too many game developers do this.

 

Yeah, i see what you mean. Although if every game had specific settings for every level of card.. That would rock! I thourougly enjoyed playing crysis on my 8400m GT in DX10(yes!) and i can honestly say nothing compares to crysis' super smoooth gameplay at framerates where other games ar annoyingly unplayable(i'm looking at you "The Witcher")

 

S.T.A.L.K.E.R anyone? a single 8800GTX can run it max @ native resolution @ 80FPS, and there is no way in hell Crysis is double the Graphics as STALKER, so lets just say it was DOUBLE the graphics... 80/2 = 20? lol

 

EA ruins any game they get their grimy little hands on.

 

Funny thing that, EA are publishers for Valve, id, Crytek and countless other game companies in the world.

/facepalm

 

EA isn't the only ones working on Crysis you know... Unless you can do better it's not fair to be rasping anyone involved in the Crysis project.

 

Yeah I agree STALKER runs great. Though graphically outdoors it is not comparable imo.

 

Well thats because Epic is well EPIC. Ok enough funny business. Epic has always been smart in thier coding for the reason you stated. Not only are their games pleasing to the eye (relative to generation), but also can be run on an array of hardware. I remember when UT2004 came out I was able to run it on a celeron based (1.3ghz P-M gen CPU) and intel extreme 2 IGP at full res and decent settings. Granted loading a game was slow, but it still ran with decent frames and eye candy. But now with UT3 maxed settings and 1920x1200 my 8600mGT struggles at the game opening but can still play, just turning detail to 4 adds some decent frames while still being just as pleasing to the eyes.

That is why Epic has always been my favorite FPS maker since they understand what gamers want and need and they ALWAYS deliver.

When I think back on BF2 and the poor coding from that I dont feel sympathy for EA...

 

actually that's pretty far off. going by polygons rendered per frame alone, the origional STALKER game did up to 300,000 polygons per frame on the most graphical areas, one of the developers of STALKER clear sky was talking about how the clear sky will do several times as many polygons per frame as the origional, and that they are pushing for 1 million polys per frame max, and that most very detailed scenes will be rendering about 800,000 per frame.

Now with that in mind, know that crysis on maximum details renders on average 2.5 million polygons per frame on almost every part of the game, and on very VERY large scenes crysis does over 6 million per frame. Take all of that, then add in the advanced shader effects, particle effects, and thousands of physics objects in each map, and it's obvious to see how much more is rendered in Crysis than stalker.

Think, 80/10=20?

I think yes, games can probebly utilize much more of the CPU than they do, but I think crysis actually uses a good amount of all cores, it uses what it needs. If your CPU isn't under load when running the game, then clearly the game doesn't need that much cpu power at that time. Try loading up the map Physis, or the other crysis physics maps, where thousands of physics objects are being knocked around constantly, and you'll soon see your CPU jump up to 100% load on all cores. Games like UT3 however, do not utilize enough CPU power, and doesn't take advantage of your entire cpu. This may be more of a problem with PhysX though, since running the PhysX maps for UT3 under software mode will make your PC run at 5fps or lower, yet the CPU load is only 20-30% on all cores. Running in hardware mode gets about 40FPS and the cpu load is STILL 20-30%.