I just wanted to say about crysis on my 8600GT machine is fabulous !!

is amazing !!! got the full game now, and it looks and runs better than the demo ,i run it all on medium in 1024x768 on my big hdtv, or i can slighltly overclock and play it in 1400x900 on my 17" laptop screen,which looks brilliant and no problems at all, its 110% playable and enjoyable, why people say this cards not enough il never know !!!

im quite shocked how great it plays now on the full game, and it just looks fabulous, i had it running side by side next to a friends quad core desktop with , i think was an 88 something, i cant remember now, and that was higher settings, and the only difference was the extras particles like rays of light in the water and stuff, and on this the draw distance is a tiny bit behind

also..how hard are the levels were youe getting hunted by the chopper and men in the woods and the onslaught level with the tanks is hard,but briliant !

its a truly amazing game, so anyone with spec like that in my sig but worried about getting the game...go out n get it !!!

 

heh, thanks man

I guess I'll have no problems running oblivion then

 

You should post some screenshots then...

At least...

 

Actually found it quite boring...

 

Medium details @ 1024x768 is not impressive. Why would you think your system is uncapable of pulling this off? 1600x1200 + high details or ultra details is another story, and forget about AA/AF.

 

Because it's a laptop that isn't really designed for games? He's happy to have it look and run so great, be glad for him =P

And yea, some pics would be awsome if you could, my 1720 is coming soon (same specs as yours).

 

All that foliage...I really didn't like how it looked without antialiasing on Thus, no Crysis for me.

But have fun yourself anyway.

 

There is no performance difference between the demo and the retail version. This has already been tested.

You are likely using a different driver or different settings than before.

 

Great story, thanks for sharing. I also think the game looks incredible. Crysis all about adjusting the settings. The two settings that affect performance the most are Shaders and Shadows. I found that by setting those down by one notch there is a huge performance gain.

One thing I found that helped the visual quality a lot was putting the AA up to 1X - you can do it by editing the shortcut on your desktop to Crysis. Right-click the shortcut and click properties. Then go to the end of the target line, type a space after the last " and put +r_UseEdgeAA 1
You'll see the difference looking at trees and other foliage.

Here is an excellent guide to all of the settings in Crysis:
http://www.tweakguides.com/Crysis_1.html

 

yeah post some screenshot

 

thanks for that post chaz, il have a read now

im not sure exactly how far i can push it with overclocking,and whats bets to turn down to sacrifice if ic an turn others up, im no expert

i just took these screen shots in standard on my 17" screen, in 1400x900, run in med settings with no overclocking on the 169.04 driivers,,and it ran fine and 110% playable, not slow or any jerk or anything, after what i read about the game before i got this machine, im very pleased with how it looks and runs ,and its a lot better than i thought it would be ,i just wanted to post this thread to show people how it looks and runs who mjight be thinking about getting an 8600gt laptop,granted you can play the game on a £2000 desktop with spec wed all love to have, but that price was out of my range, a month ago i was using an acer aspire with xp and an xti x700, i sold it for £300 and bought this and i paid £600 for this from the dell outlet inc vat and delivery, you cant beat it for that price and the upgrade i got, i wnated the upgrade for vista ,cod 4 and pes 2008, and it runs crysis and looks good enough for me on these settings !!

 

Thanks for posting pics Polsa, they actually look incredible. You really just make me 10 times more anxious to get my 1720, I can't believe i'll be able to run that lol.

 

i think it looks incredible too for a laptop, them screens were only done using alt+print screen and pasting in to paint too, not with a proper screen shot taker

the game runs great ,im gonna work on tweaking things too and just seeing how good i can get it,and what works better if i overclock,and drop some settings maybe and raise others etc, ive only had the machine 3 weeks, and i had ati graphics in my last laptop,so im neww to nvidea ,and only just learning , so im gonna work on tweaking and settings , when you get your machine send me an im if you need any advice and info about anything !!

its a great machine, if i were you id have call of duty 4 ready and waiting to put on your machine as soon as it arrives, that game runs like a dream on this, as does pes 2008 and mcrae dirt !!

next up for me is hitman 4 and rainbow 6 vegas , which ive never played

im new to vista too, ive just been dabbling with the vista gadgets today and the sidebar, which ive overlooked until now,theres some brilliant ones you can download, the more i use vista the more i love it !

ive got the dell express slot media remote ready to unwwrap christmas day,and a nice pair of philps wireless headphones, and today i bought a microsoft wireless laser desktop 6000 , which looks really good with all the vista buttons and stuff, cant wait to get gaming with that !!

http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/mouseandkeyboard/ProductDetails.aspx?pid=082&active_tab=systemRequirements

next up is a usb tv card and a 500 gig external hard drive or network drive or something !

 

Those screenshots look awesome, thanks for sharing. Are you running the game in DX9 mode? If not you should, DX10 is meaningless in this game and only decreases performance.
By the way, Crysis has a built-in screenshots taking utility, just press F12 and the screens will be saved in JPEG format in Documents. If it does not work then you need to unrestrict the console. Let me know if you need to know how to do that.

 

thanks chaz, nice one on the f12 ,il give it a go !! the method i used wasnt too great, sometimes they came out blank or a bit ropey !

yeah running it in dx9 mode ,im glad you agree that they look good !! i struggle to see how people would say that the games not good on the 8600gt ,its brilliant, just in dx 10 mode on settings cranked right up, would just make it supreme, but that doesnt mean that this isnt good,far from !

 

Hit the ~ key and type r_DisplayInfo=1

Tell us what your framerate is. Min, Avg, Max.

Also, there is a built-in benchmark in your game folder.

Look in:

C:\Program Files\Electronic Arts\Crytek\Crysis SP Demo\Bin32

(Obviously yours won't say Demo)

Find Benchmark_CPU.bat, and Benchmark_GPU.bat. These will spit out the results you see in the link in my signature. The numbers will be different than what you see in the in-game FPS counter because of being in different areas, and having all of the physics and game data come into play. Those are just GPU and CPU benchmarks.

Looks great, now let's see how it is running.

 

Half of world desktop can't even run crysis on 320x200 at minimum details,so a notebook that run it at 1024x768 at medium it's a good score,remember this is a notebook!

 

Looks great! I ran it at 1024x768, medium details, with no AA, and got it very playable. The game is the most beautiful on the market... but just couldn't find the revolutionary fun in it...

Just me I guess.

 

Crysis is not the most beautiful on the market...it's only Far Cry with steroids but nothing special,maybe the most beautiful game (graphics) at maximum settings is cod4

 

CoD4 looks great... but to me, there's just something good looking about Crysis.

 

CoD4 is only CoD2 on steroids but nothing special.

 

Here's my results from GPU and CPU benchmark (3 runs):

CPU:



Min: 14.41
Avg: 29.49
Max: 38.39


GPU:



Min: 22.38
Avg: 32.83
Max: 39.71

Using these settings:





Vostro 1500 / C2D 2.2GHz / 8600m GT DDR 2 @ 600 MHz / 500 MHz

 

whats that on the vostro or the desktop ?

when i tried to run them,it started running them in direct x 10 mode and i was getting 20 odd fps, how do i run them in dx 9 what i play the game in ?

 

htwingnut try to use same settings, but all high settings to medium, i think the game will be much more playable for you whilst you wont notice extreme much difference.

 

See, I told you all. He gets an average of 30 FPS on mostly high, i get about 40 FPS average with med - high. People who complain don't know what they are doing, and the game looks GREAT on med - high settings, why would you complain you can't run the BEST LOOKING game out on ULTRA high settings with an older vid card? Doesn't make sense.

 

Thanks for the story since i am going to get a m1530. What other settings do you use, medium? Also does the game look good from graphical standpoint from your laptop or is it just playable?

 

It looks GREAT, and plays very well. I probably get higher FPS than what the benchmark calculated too as I'm sure that's a worse case scenario.

 

Mostly high,yes, but with shaders and shadows on low. THOSE are the real fps killers, and also starting from medium, shadows and shaders turn the game into a totally different one, gpraphics like.Try that.

 

Well I have CoD4 for my 360 already, so I play it on there ,but i'll definitly be picking up Crysis, The Witcher, and most likely Company of heroes.

 

It runs great like this, not sure why I would want to reduce quality?

 

I will try running shaders and shadows at medium, but I played with those on high on my desktop, and there is a noticeable difference, but doesn't affect gameplay at all IMHO.

 

the only setting that really affects gameplay is putting the physics to low, because then you can't destroy the huts nor most other things, which really puts you at a disadvantage gameplay wise...

keeping the physics at high is best.

otherwise, shadow quality at low removes almost all the shadows, which is really not ideal. shadow quality at medium is a really good compromise imo.

shader quality also drastically changes the look of the game from low to medium and from medium to high... i would rather have high shader quality than anything else on there, for what its worth.

 

You guys may manage 30fps average in the timedemo, but you won't touch that in-game.

I need 45fps in the GPU timedemo to get a smooth 35fps in the game. This ensures that I stay above 30 at almost all times, which is ideal.

I run 1440x900, with all details set to low except for Physics, and Game Effects set to medium. Those two affect the game too much to be set to low, and they don't seem to affect performance. Physics affects destruction of objects such as buildings, and Game Effects control the explosions and special effects. These are really lame on low.

Try these settings, I think you'll be surprised how much quicker the game runs.

 

game effects is only noticable when huge fights against troops is over. The higher the setting, the longer the troops will stay death in field. (on low they disappear very fast)

 

No, try turning Game Effects down to low and blow something up. You'll notice right away that there is no explosion.

 

Thats awesome! Nice pix of the game! Regardless what people say the 8600 is quite capable of running most modern games for "most" gamers.

@Technoguy

I understand your post in this thread as you are always comparing the Hardcore performance of the "pc" as also I have read your posts on the 'ps3 vs pc' as aligned as you are with your preference for the console ( as it is a well performing machine, outright), why try and rain on the OP parade, obviously he is well informed that his card is not an 8800m gtx SLI or a the the higher level desktop version of said card. Can't we all just game along? lol.

 

So whats up with Shader quality? doesnt it ruin the look of game when you set it to low?
In tweak guides i saw how much of an effect shadows has and putting it to low makes the game look less realistic than far cry in some occasions

 

exactly man, i know what this card is, i paid £600 for this machine and upgraded it form an ati x700 machine that was a few years old, i couldnt afford to fork out much more than when i bought this, and this was almost £1000 on dells main site when i bought it from the outlet for and saved 40%

a mate of mines got a quad core desktop with the 8800 gtx, and we had them runnind side by side with crysis, the only difference was his had the littler effects,like rays of light going through the water when swimming and things like that, before playing the game on here and hearing what people generaly have said,i was worried it would be totaly unplayable, people said cod 4 makes you proud to have a 8600gt, and crysis wont, i posted this to point out to people thinking about getting an 8600 gt machine, or the game, that thats not the case and it in fact runs it really well for the price range,its not the bare minimum coz im all on med settings and its great,and theres people playing the game on all low settings and enjoying it , to play crysis full settings on a laptop, your talking big big money, more than double what i paid at least, some people cant afford to just fork that out to play a game, and some people need a laptop and not a desktop, so thus need to find a good balence between price and performance !

 

Agreed fully; shader quality makes or breaks the visuals of Crysis. I recommend running them on high as well. Medium is the bare minimum.
The explosions and physics are handled by the CPU so if you have a good CPU then you should crank those up.

 

And that's the problem - Shader and Shadow quality are what cripple the game with these cards

Mine isn't playable unless they are set to low. I don't consider 20fps playable.

 

Crysis is pumping a whole lot more shaders and polygons than CoD4, I'll tell you that. Though I must hand it to Crytek, CryEngine 2.0, just like it's predecessor is actually quite an efficient engine. It's throwing out and rendering insane amounts of detail that when in full max settings, CoD4 doesn't really compare. CoD4's beauty is the fact that it's made to run fast and smooth, yet still look good in most areas, play well, and have great animation systems that make it look very realistic. In all honesty, I don't think CoD4 holds a candle to Crysis. Both games are great however.

 

Well according to tweaking guides I've seen, shadows are no where near as effecting as shader quality. From my experience, that's the case with my desktop (Athlon X2 5600 + 8800GTS 320 MB + 4 GB DDR2), and also a good way to better scale the machine is through lowering object detail. My best advice:

Focus the high settings towards object details, shadow quality and textures. These elements are among the most noticeable, the texture shaders are almost worthless unless the textures themselves are actually in high resolution. Of course physics can be tuned to maximum since it's CPU, not GPU bound. As far as other things like water and particle effects go, I say keep water around medium, and everything else you can tune to medium or low. Just to let you guys know, I DID get Crysis to run on my laptop without driver/graphics support fuss. It only clocked in at 15 frames a second at the best when running with an overclocked profile but it still worked nevertheless. What I haven't tried is forcing my GPU to Shader Model 2.0 mode in Rivatuner (the 7200 is SM3.0 compliant), and that actually gave me a good boost with Call of Duty 4 on it (which allowed me to run decently at 1024 x 768 resolution, high textures, normal maps at normal settings, shadows (yay!) and everything else off or at lowest). Hmm, I actually want to go try it now.

I just love tweaking

 

graphics aside, i still think crysis game play doesnt offer anything like the intense fighting that cod 4 offers, some of the cod4 game play and battles are just pure brilliant and imerese you right in to the action, as god as crysis looks and is, it doesnt have that same element as cod4,sometime sin cod when your huddled behind something and bulklets and explosions all over the place, you geta real feeling of war and what it would be like to be in that situation for real,its intense and brilliant, and that aspect is so much greater than any of the fighting ive encountered in crysis so far,but cod4 doesnt offer the freedom as crysis,imagine cod 4 style but with massive exansive areas of city and free roaming missions !! they are tho total different kind of games and i love both of them !

 

I'm a huge Far Cry fan so I was automatically a lover of Crysis. My only real beef with it is that it IS a system killer, it ended with a very purposely done cliffhanger, it was kinda short, and the fact that I can never get on the multiplayer because of the "server authentication" issue that just pisses me off. I really like the games intention to bring some new things to the table like nanosuit, much more destructible environments even though they were not too crucial to the game itself (but a nice touch), zero-g gameplay, and lots of environment to run around in. I must say though I do miss the amount of vehicle usage that Far Cry had, the insane length in Far Cry and pure silliness of it too.

 

ive not tried crysis online yet, but the server authentication issue , i had that with cod4 but fixed it, it was something to do with punkbuster, i just goodled and found this...

http://www.crymod.com/thread.php?threadid=11481

,i never played far cry fully, coz my last machine didnt run it very well, but i wanna track back and get the game, i played and enjoyed the 1st few levels, i love crysis too, and ive been adicted to it the last few days, im just entering the mine level !

i completed cod4 on regular, and im just having a break from it to forget some of it, then go through on hardened, although ive tried some levels on hardened and it got a bit hard almost impossible like on some bits, just re trying and trying and trying all different ways etc, im not sure it will be playable on hardened, let alone the hardest setting ? ! il make a proepr judgement on whats my fave of the 2 when ive finished crysis, but at the moment i think im tipped towards cod4 asa favourite, just for the game play, its an immense game , i love the fighing in it, and ive always been a war/realism fan over futureistic sort of stuff anyway, at the end of the day both games are different and brilliant !!

 

Yeah to be honest I've actually reverted to alot of CS: Source as of right now, what a great way to work my 8800GTS on my desktop *sarcasm*

Right now I'm just trying to hold back from getting the 15" Macbook Pro I want (the $2500 one with the 256 MB 8600GT!), I want to get it next August as by then my notebook would be 2 years old and I told myself I'd have it that long before replacing it. That and I'm betting that Apple will install 8800Ms on those things, at least the 17" model. If the 15" only gets the 8800M GTS (with 64 shaders, not 96 like on the 8800M GTX), I'll still be incredibly happy with it. I really wanted a Mac in general and I was going to replace my notebook with something nice and powerful for games and heavy apps anyways, so I think it should be a perfect fit. Have my Mac machine, but have my mobile gaming notebook too (with XP installed on it of course).

 

I doubt it. Unfortunately, Apple doesn't care for gamers, hence they never put top of the line GPU's in their machines. IF the MBP would get an upgrade, the 8700m GT might be their first choice. But I don't think a new GPU will be on their list of updates for 2008, actually. I hope they'll prove me wrong though.

 

But considering Apple likes to cater towards developers, graphic designers, photo/video editors, and whatnot, I think they should use the 8800M GTS at least, even if it's overkill for many of those tasks. And there's no real point to go to the 8700GT except for the increase in memory, because I could just overclock the 8600GT to the 87's clocks, as they are the same exact GPU core. The fact that the Apples have EFI won't affect the overclocking capabilities do you think?

 

No I don't think so because mine overclocks just fine Well, eventually they will need to upgrade the GPU of course, but I don't think they'll make that a priority. Maybe late 2008?

It's true that you can overclock the 8600 to 8700 speeds yes, but the 8700 runs alot cooler at those speeds AND you can overclock it higher than you can with the 8600. So a 8700 would be a nice little update. Maybe a 8600 for the 15", and a 8700 for the 17"?

 

Well either way, I'm pretty dead set on the 15" Macbook Pro. I don't like 17" machines, too big for my tastes. What I'm setting out to do is the same thing my friend does, buy a new Mac every year, selling the old one for great buy back. He just sold his 13.3 inch Macbook with a 2.0 Core Duo (Core Duo, not Core 2 Duo!) for I think it was at least $750 bucks and put it towards his new one. I was like holy damn.

It would be nice if I could get the 15" Macbook Pro without an HDD and RAM, I could just cannibalize the 2 GB DDR2 and 120 GB HDD from my current lappy.