poor performance in crysis....64 bit vista

so i'm running the following hardware:
2.5GHz Core 2 Duo
dual 8700M GT in SLI
4 GB ram
Vista 64 bit

been trying to find more posts by ppl that encountered slow performance with crysis, but i can't search the forum for some reason.

i had xp pro 32 bit and crysis installed on the machine and crysis worked just a bit better.

with med settings @ 1024x768, i'm getting choppy play/low frame rates. i know the hardware is good enough, just don't know what's causing it.
in the nvidia control panel i have these settings changed only:

single display performance mode
force split frame rendering
vertical sync - force on



i have patch 1.21 and the hotfix installed.
also have the latest forceware for these cards (167.51)
and i know i have all the latest drivers installed everywhere else.
anyone else have this problem and know how to improve performance ?

 

use newer laptop2go drivers... check their fora for eg. 174.* line of drivers (can't recall which one is the best in terms of stability and performance).

 

Are you running the 32bit or 64bit version of Crysis?

 

Additionally, you generally see some performance drop switching to Vista from XP. Not by very much though, and in some cases, performance is equal or somewhat better.

 

if the 177 series is the latest on laptopvideo2go, why are ppl downloading 174.xx, 175.xx drivers for their cards ?
wouldn't you want the latest ?

all these forceware releases are confusing. i went to nvidia's site and downloaded 167.51 because it's the latest forceware shown for the dual 8700M GT and it lists the m1730, which is what i have.

how are the 174, 175 and 177 forcewares different ?

 

For drivers, Latest =/= best

Sometimes older versions work better. Best is to try out different drivers and see what works for you.

 

I can tell you from my experience, 177.73 has given me the best gaming experience in all my games, including Crysis. I had a real problem with .79. This should be taken with a grain of salt, however, as drivers seem to have a mind of their own and act like they want to act. Kinda like my ex-wife.

 

and if i can recall there was a topic here on the drivers and 174.74 was i believe one of the most stable and performance-wise best driver to get... still i'm on the 177.70 which seems to be the best choice for the games i play on my compal rig... yet my friend has better framerate with 177.79 ones. so yeah, it's hard to say which one is the best one. you can always check the fora and see if someone with similar config as yours reports any driver to be the best for the games you play, eg. crysis.

cheers!

 

I get better results with 177 series drivers too...at 1440x900 all on medium haha because my slow GPU...and it runs great

 

Its because your playing DX10 now and not DX9.

Right click the game launch icon and select play in DX9 and your old performance should be back.

 

177.79 , and Triple C pack should improve your Crysis experience.

 

when i installed the game no icons were put on the desktop, so i basically copied the crysis.exe icon onto the desktop (from the bin64 folder). when i right click, i don't see an option to play in either mode.

 

what is this Triple C pack ?

 

after installing 177.79, everything that's supposed to be white is now yellow. this is wierd....

 

im using 177.79 on my laptop I think the game is ok I didnt notice any issues.

As for your game add -dx9 to the end of your target line in your game shortcut for forced dx9 mode. It makes about 10fps difference to be in DX9 for me or more and it looks the same.

 

i placed -dx9 one space after the quotation mark of the target...performance looks good, but this is after i uninstalled 177.79 and went back to 167.51.

i'm finding it hard to believe this game is so demanding that i have to set the res to 1024x768 and everything on medium in order to play smoothly. granted this isn't the highest-end graphics board i'm running (dual 8700's), it still should be good enough to get better visuals than this....

i'm going to try running the game one more time with the option -dx10 and see what happens.

 

might be a stupid question: have you enabled SLI?
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=202449

 

it was enabled when i installed 177.79...

basically the situation is this: yesterday i bought 2 wd scorpio black 7200 rpm drives, installed them into the machine, set up the raid 0 array, then i installed vista x64. after that i proceeded to install all the necessary drivers...starting with all the intel drivers first, followed by all the other drivers and ending with 167.51.
everything looked smooth running, i installed my apps, utils, and games. fear/extraction point/nwn2 and crysis last.

all the while windows update has been slugish with finding all the necessary updates because it installed 20-30 updates before it decided that SP1 was not installed on my machine, so it finally popped SP1 on the machine today, followed by some other updates after that.

everything seems fine on the machine, when it's booted up after a few mins drive activity disappears and it's smooth. but i don't see any improvement in drive activity after i switched to raid 0.

 

Yes raid 0 performance is a myth for the most part. I have been saying that for years.

 

Wait ... SLI shouldn't matter, I thought Crysis could really only use 1 card anyways? Correct me if I'm wrong.

 

LOL. You're joking, right?

 

Yes you are wrong, crysis not only can utilize SLI but also the 64bit architecture.

@zero7404, something actually happened to me few days ago. I was originally using 177.41, but after a windows update installed, my card downclocked all the way from 500/800 to 200/310. The issue was resolved by switching back to 175.95. So I would suggest you to try out the 175 series.

 

after messing around with a few other games....
fear runs very good with maxed out settings (more than 40 fps), with an occasional slow-down at some points during play....but still runs alot better than crysis.

i turned on the frame rates display for crysis and i was getting on average 35-45 fps with the 1440 res and everything set to medium.

i mean it runs, it just doesn't run the way i'd like it to. i think part of the problem is not the hardware, but this nvidia forceware package....do i need to have forceware installed on this machine, or can i dispense with it and just install the drivers directly into windows (via update driver in device manager) ? i previously tried a higher version (don't remember the number...see above posts) but that resulted in yellow in place of white. don't know what's up with that ?

i am not sure if windows has the additional features of being able to manage the 2 GPUs and memory, as well as additional tweaks that you can do in forceware....

regarding the drives....i realize the only way i'd see true speed is if i take the plunge and sink 1 large into 2 x 128 GB SSD's and set those up in raid 0. in the meantime, any raid 0 should be at least twice as fast as a single HHD.

 

You wont see a difference on the Raid 0 when it comes to gaming, although load times might speed up a little. In a windows PC, Raid 0 is mostly intended to expand the OS HDD size, performance will be noticed in some things(boot-ups, file copying, expanding, encrypting...ect) not enough to make me use it.

 

Well if you're not using it, how do you know exactly HOW much it increases performance? For all you know, it could cause Windows to start running backwards.

And regarding you performance "in some things" list (boot-ups, file copying, expanding, encrypting...ect), which again, you're not totally sure of because you don't use RAID. This list consists of about 90% of what makes an OS an OS. If RAID is enhancing performance on the above listed items, not to mention faster game loads, I'd say that's a pretty good reason for someone to use it, wouldn't you?

And no, RAID is not going to help your FPS performance in games, it will however, speed up the time it takes to get there.

 

i'm still thinking that this hardware i have can do alot better than what im seeing. would the system perform better if i removed forceware and just installed the right driver for both gpu's ? the purpose of SLI for me at least, is gaming. if Crysis can use SLI without having forceware to configure everything for SLI, then perhaps the problem might be that the game is trying to do the same things that forceware is trying to do...?

 

RAID 0 virtually doubles write speed,so YES, it works.

SLi does work, check this out:

 

i'm not here to dispute this. i'm here to figure out what software and features related to graphics are useless, and remove them from my machine.

 

in the meantime, i get most of my info from this site. this guy is pretty good, he's got an nvidia guide, windows guides, and also a crysis guide.

http://www.tweakguides.com/

if you read thru he explains nearly all relevant software settings, and what tweaks you can do to improve.

 

so my findings are that crysis will play smooth in -dx9 mode under vista 64 bit with 1440 resolution, and all medium settings, at about 35-45 fps throughout the game.

not bad, could be better tho. running the latest directx, official nvidia forceware (167.51) and crysis is patched up to v1.21 (hotfix).

 

I can tell you from my own experience and testing on my desktop.

I currently have both XP pro x64 and Vista ultimate X64 set up, and have done alot of testing on crysis. The resolution I used was 1920x1080. And testing was done with the custom timedemo using the 4th level in the game. and a custom configuration file for the highest possible graphics. patch 1.21

XP x64, running crysis in 32 bit DX9, 32FPS avg.
Vista ult x64, crysis in 32 bit dx9, 21FPS avg.
Vista ult x64, crysis in 32 bit DX10, 18fps avg.

64 bit mode made no change to the performance at all.
Running in vista on max settings also caused the game to hiccup alot to load, something that never happens on XP. Anyone who hasn't tried thier gaming notebook or desktop on XP should really give it another go, I really think the performance speaks for it's self, and after over a year now of vista, nothing has gotten better.

 

thanks for the input. xp is something that i'm not going back to, so i'll have to find ways to tweak in vista.

those r some insane upload and download numbers u got in your signature....pass me some bandwidth, will ya ?

 

So run both XP for gaming and vista for other stuff? having XP installed would take about an extra 4GB of space after getting all of the neccisary drivers and what not. I think even the official Crysis minimum system requirements speak for themselves .

2.8GHz pentium 4 or higher (XP) (3.2GHz pentium 4 for vista)
Radeon 9800 or better (XP) (radeon X800 for vista)

Vista takes an entire generation higher of graphics, and an extra 400MHz of cpu power just to run the game like xp..


Oh, and sure, if you pay half my internet bill

 

i tried the dual boot thing once before. i think i'll stick with a single OS on my machine for now. if i wanted to get into a hardcore gaming mode, i'd probably just swap out my raid array for the 200GB drive that came with the computer because it's loaded with XP already.

wow, paying for that bandwidth ? i thought it was company provided or something....