Crysis on the P7811-FX

So I've been running Crysis at 1024 x 768 with everything set to High, 2x anti-aliasing, no problems, but the fans would ramp up a lot, especially the GPU on the left side, so I ordered this from Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/ACC-NT-CRYO-S...1?ie=UTF8&s=industrial&qid=1219776668&sr=8-11

Yep, I know that $70 is a lot to pay for a notebook cooler but this thing is built out of solid aluminum, beautifully finished, and should last the rest of my life, as well as earning great reviews for really moving a lot of air. I liked the built-in USB hub too.

It came today and setting the 7811 on it with hope in my heart I upped my Crysis rez to 1280 x 1024; no go! Almost immediately I was getting "flash through" of background graphics, my weapon disappeared (that's NEVER a good thing, right ladies?), and performance got all jerky. Didn't crash, tho.

So I thought to start a new thread where people could post the resolutions they've achieved with Crysis on the 7811, any tips or tweaks they have tried and if they worked, info on new video drivers, improvement upgrading the CPU makes, etc.

I hope others share my interest...

 

Sounds like a driver problem. Have you updated your drivers or are you using the stock drivers? Use laptopvideo2go.com for the newest drivers. I updated mine on my P7811-Fx, i don't have Crysis to tell you if it helps.

 

It makes sense that the performance would suffer at higher resolutions, but the image quality shouldn't. The weapons shouldn't disappear and you shouldn't see graphical glitches, just a significant drop in FPS. I think your gpu might be faulty. I have a P-7811FX and I can run crysis at 1920x1200 with very solid framerates at all high setting except medium shadows, shaders and objects with Very high textures. The fans ramp up quite a bit but I never experience image quality problems.

 

Some probably will... not me though. While Crysis is an amazing game it is also a horrible piece of bloated code.

I stopped careing about using Crysis as any form of benchmark a good while ago. its just a poorly coded game (even though it is a pretty amazing game)

Top end desktops with 3x280's in SLI cant even get 90 FPS with everything maxed out on the bloody game. Its honestly too much. And i dont even play it anymore due to the fact that i "should" be able to at a decent Frame rate (as other games that look just as good play at a decent frame rate) but due to the poor design i can't.

I'll wait for warhead which is supposedly using a new polished code that will run great in "normal" equipment...not the Roadrunner with 100 SLIed 280's and 100 crossfired 4850's... oh and dont forget the liquid nitrogen cooling unit

Sorry about going off topic with my daily Crysis rant

 

Ya, terrible game, only there to make people feel bad about their laptop GPU's.

 

Thanks, I'll look into it more. Do you have any anti-aliasing on?

Odd thought: could the laptop cooler running off of USB be consuming enough voltage to be causing the video problem? I guess I need to investigate...

 

No doubt you're right, I really wasn't thinking of it in benchmark terms however: I just want to finish the game and see how it turns out! I mean gameplay is really just FAR CRY on steroids, but I wanna find out (like on LOST) what the heck it IS out there in the bushes... lol.

(Don't anyone tell me, please...)

 

Mad, what driver version are you using and has it been entirely stable? Someone either here or on another 7811 forum reported BSD after updating his and had to roll back to stock, but I can't remember exactly what version he tried...

 

On my P6860 I run Crysis at 1440x900, no AA or vsync, high textures, shaders, physics, sound, everything else medium, and framerate usually hovers at mid-20's. But I've just recently installed the game and am still at the beginning beach/forest areas (I've heard that some later locations really kill performance, though I've yet to play that far). Using 175.19 whql drivers and I have a T9300 2.5ghz cpu.

My left side exhaust fan always ramps up to max when I run a 3d game, so I think that's normal. Yeah it's noisy, but at least its a consistent whir that quickly drowns out to the sounds of the game. My GPU temps get to high 60's celsius when gaming (according to hwmonitor), and I've never seen any artifacting like what you're describing.

 

Crysis scales very well. I eagerly await your superior-scaling realtime 3D engine.

But, yeah, this laptop doesn't really do Crysis justice at higher resolutions and quality settings. At moderate settings - even at native resolution - it's quite capable at pushing 30 FPS.

 

When i get home ill get my driver version. Im going to try 177.92 tonight, so far the forum looks good and no issues with that one. Try the driver first, if thats not it, then your gpu is bad. Bad gpu's are not common (except the 8600m stuff going on now).

 

I actually found a really good guide with tips on optimizing crysis. I did not try it myself yet as I am still trying to decide whether this machine is for me, so I haven't done too much fine tuning.

The guide can be found here. http://www.gamecritics.com/the-noobs-guide-to-optimizing-crysis

 

"Using 175.19 whql drivers and I have a T9300 2.5ghz cpu."


Thanks for the info but I think I'll elect to be conservative: we are talking completely different chipsets and video cards here, and I'd rather go slow and rely on what is KNOWN to work well with the 7811 than risk spending a bunch of time re-installing. Thanks for your input, though.

 

Post back how it goes with the 177.92 drivers, okay?

 

177.92 seem fine so far. I tested Source with it.

 

Cool! BTW I rebooted and reset Crysis for 1600 x 1200; it played "like butter" with everything set to high, so I guess my earlier experience was a bad load or just an anomaly. I did find an external brick to power the laptop cooler, tho, so maybe that did help. Anyway I'm glad to know that my video card probably isn't bad after all; I had visions of just how it would go if I went back to BB and tried to get an exchange on the basis of a game playing fine at one rez but not another...

LIKELY SCENARIO:

"Sure, we'll be glad to look into it. We'll send it back to the factory and have them check it out, you should have it back in time for Christmas, maybe..."

 

Yeah, popped 'em on, (177.92), no problems. I can't tell for sure but the video does seem a little more zippy. I noticed the previous version was 40 megs and change, this one over 80; do you know what they added?

 

the larger driver's are generally just the international versions and include all languages, that's where the extra file size comes from.

 

btw as to warhead:

 

Well that sucks

An article i read a few months back was praising the new coding that was going to allow the game to run better with less powerful machines because it was now very neat and streamlined compared to the original game.

I guess its time to go back to believeing none of what i hear and only 1/2 of what i read

 

the game itself is too boring.

I have it installed just to impress people for a minute.

 

As far as I know, all of the tweaks/mods listed in that article deal directly with the crysis software itself. What machine you use should not really affect your results all that much.

Even for someone taking the conversative approach and not trying out the more complex tweaks, his breakdown of how each video setting affects performance should prove useful for some.

 

I run it just fine at 1280x800, all high, shadows on medium, VL on low, and textures and objects on Very high. Don't know why you were having a problem running it...

 

Well it's all preliminary, before optimization presumably - don't give up hope quite yet!

As for belief: not much of what you hear and read, and not everything you see, either.

 

Warhead is out in less than a month, how much optimization can be done at this point? This also happened when Crysis was near release. People hoped the final retail build would be better-optimized than the pre-release demo, but it was pretty indicative of the final product.

A high-end quad-core system can only run dx9, 1152x864 res, and get 30-40 fps. That's means Crytek was lying about the engine optimization. I'd be happy to be proven wrong and will be happy to buy the game, but as of now its taken off my radar.

 

I run it at the same res, good framerates

 

We don't really know, do we? If they haven't tried to optimize yet a LOT could be done in a very short time, and you kinda need finalized code to tweak or what's the point? Also it's SCHEDULED to come out in a month; as we learned from, say, Spore or even Vista itself that may not mean much.

Not that I'm arguing your basic point. But the business model is such that release trumps optimizing the code almost every time (again Vista is a perfect model), so you may well be right. Unless the code is SO bloated (Vista again) that people really don't buy the product the Big Bosses would rather have something that's selling than something that runs really really well as most people - certainly not all, but most - won't know the difference.

And so the world turns...

 

Crysis warhead already went gold... so your best bet for optimization would be the first patch

 

Why are you guys setting the resolution so low when native is 1920x1200?

If you go into the setup and change it to 1920x1200 with no vsync no anti aliasing and full screen, then click the optimal settings button (it will set everything to high), then go into the advanced settings and change textures to med and shaders to med, I found it ran perfectly in it's native 1920x1200 res for me.

With those settings "r_displayinfo 1" showed at least 30-40+ FPS at all times and only slow down I had was playing online sometimes, but I was on wireless also...

I did also have a 8" fan next to the gpus fan exhaust, facing away from the laptop as to pull the heat from the gpu heat vent on the left side, if facing.

 

you must have a freak machine, at the settings you describe, the best I get is 17fps

 

I bet he has a clevo 901c with sli

I get around 17 fps with those settings too. I play at native resolution with everything set to low.

 

The drivers on mine are forceware 175.80 and it's a bone stock system. I didn't do anything except run the automatic update once, which took forever, so it may have something to do with a direct-x update being the difference.

 

wow.

ten letter req.

 

Which laptop are you using? Running Crysis at 1920x1200 at acceptable frame rates with the 7811 FX is considered impossible.

 

Funny you should ask...

I was working my way up there, had gotten to great playability @ 1600 x 1200, when I noticed that since updating the video drivers last night to 177.92 the highest resolution offered in the game is now 1280 x 1024! Has anybody else seen this after updating?

Rebooted & all but 1280 x 1024 is as high as she goes now. Plays great, everything on High, 2X anti-aliasing, but still. Hmmm...

Ideas, anyone?

 

I edited my original settings post, I meant to say shaders not shadows.

maskedformed: The p-7811 fx can run crysis at native 1920x1200 with the tweaks I suggested earlier in this thread, using stock drivers.

tallan: I think the stock drivers for the 9800m are customized specifically for the system, I'd suggest sticking with stock drivers for now.

What I also observed is that once you follow my directions, and accept the changes, alot of the advanced settings that the game just changed to high will now automatically be set to "custom" even though there is no "custom" option available if you try to manually set each advanced attribute!! this is online gameplay only, I tried it in the regular game and the settings seemed to remain as usual no "custom" anywhere?

I think it's also worth noting that I have it patched to v1.2.1
and the DirectX version is 64bit custom build=6156

 

Once you play at high shaders, medium is a distractingly noticeable drop in quality.

 

Turn down the post processing for a large boost in performance. Plus it makes it easier to aim. The motion blur kinda annoys me.

 

Agreed, an m1730 x9000 with 8800m gtx sli's it is not, however it will play crysis smoothly at native 1920x1200 - tweaked out a bit.

Regarding the quality, I think that the graphics at med/high on the p-7811fx are still stunningly realistic, plus it's $3500 cheaper than the extreme x9000 m1730 and it's playing the same game; albeit without all the setting on high and no HW physics accelerator.

Believe me, I own both systems and if I can own the $5000 system, yet still play crysis on the $1400 system and be satisfied with the gameplay, that speaks volumes in and of itself.

 

Isn't it more cost effective to build a really, REALLY powerful desktop instead of a heavy, extremely expensive laptop?

 

Which is the big advantage of the 7811: it's big (and powerful) but the price isn't.

I spend a good part of the year traveling in an RV and a desktop solution is far more trouble than it's worth: even a compact tower with screen and keyboard is a much bigger & more cumbersome package than the largest laptop. But for ultimate framerates and longevity via upgrades if you have the room a desktop certainly would be the way to go.