Is it me or is Crysis horribly optimized?

L31mr0d

Was going to post this in the games section, but it really has more to do with my computer setup than anything.

I have Crysis installed on my 2 machines, which are:

HTPC: Vista 32bit, 1x500GB WD SE16 2.4Ghz E6600, 2GB DDR2-800Mhz 4-5-4-18, EVGA 8800GTX 630/2000 w/ 169.12 drivers

MAIN: Vista 64bit, 2x320GB WD SE16 RAID 0, 3Ghz QX6700, 4GB DDR2-800Mhz 4-4-4-12, EVGA 8800GTX 630/2000 w/ 169.12 drivers

On the HTPC i'm running Crysis at 1280x720 and on the main pc its running at 1280x1024. The main PC is superior in every way to the HTPC except for the graphics card.

Yet when I run the Crysis benchmark i'm getting an average of 23fps on the HTPC and only 19FPS on the Main PC??? What gives??? I know the res is higher but the rest of the system is a much higher spec and its running in x64 which Crytek have said should yield 15% more performance.

Anyone else having a similar experience? Is there anything I can try to try and squeeze another ounce of performance out this machine or is Crysis weighted so heavily on the GPU that any amount of overclocking won't make a difference.

Khannie

There's a 40% difference in the amount of pixels displayed between the two. That's a serious amount. Just worth noting.

edit: I have to say though, that's a decent box. 19 fps = sh1t.

L31mr0d

Khannie wrote: »

There's a 40% difference in the amount of pixels displayed between the two. That's a serious amount. Just worth noting.

I had factored this, but what i'm asking is shouldn't the much higher spec of the one machine over the other at least balance this out? I've noticed, running the benchmark, that Crysis is using a good 300MB more RAM than on my HTPC, but this seems to be making no difference. Also shouldn't the RAID0 or the Quad be aiding performance also?

RoyalMarine

probably a stupid question, but would the different vista versions make any difference at all?

L31mr0d

RoyalMarineComm wrote: »

probably a stupid question, but would the different vista versions make any difference at all?

ones 64bit the others 32bit, 64bit allows for the OS to utilize more than 4GB of RAM. Also Crysis is (supposedly?) optimized to support 64bit and they claim it performs up to 15% better than 32bit, but I amn't seeing it.

uberpixie

L31mr0d wrote: »

I had factored this, but what i'm asking is shouldn't the much higher spec of the one machine over the other at least balance this out? I've noticed, running the benchmark, that Crysis is using a good 300MB more RAM than on my HTPC, but this seems to be making no difference. Also shouldn't the RAID0 or the Quad be aiding performance also?

Raid will only load levels quicker, it won't really have a huge effect when the game is actually running.

The one thing I did notice when I was just using the in game benchmark utility was that when I overclocked the My Q6600 from stock to 3Ghz:the biggest difference was made to the minimum frame rate, I think the max frames went up by 1 or two frames, but my min went from 21fps to 27fps.
(I did this for the last level as it was getting a litttle bit choppy, game was much smoother when I overclocked)

(Q6600, 8800GTS 320mb, 3.25 gig ram, raptor 150 gig under XP 32bit)
Most setting were set to high bar shadows,shaders and post processing which were set to medium (as far as I can remember), all @ 1280 x 1024.

What settings are you running the game at? All high?

L31mr0d

uberpixie wrote: »

What settings are you running the game at? All high?

Yeah everything set to very high, 4xAA.

I've ran some more benchs, this time running the 32bit version and nada, no difference in FPS whatsoever, so running 64bit is having zero impact on the fps. I also tried lowering the AA to 2x but this has also had barely an effect on FPS. I've tried pushing the graphics card higher but i'm getting artifacts at anything higher than 630/2000 so I guess thats its limit

Steffano2002

Out of curiosity, what FPS do you get when you run Crysis at 1280x720 on the MAIN PC?

uberpixie

L31mr0d wrote: »

Yeah everything set to very high, 4xAA.

I've ran some more benchs, this time running the 32bit version and nada, no difference in FPS whatsoever, so running 64bit is having zero impact on the fps. I also tried lowering the AA to 2x but this has also had barely an effect on FPS. I've tried pushing the graphics card higher but i'm getting artifacts at anything higher than 630/2000 so I guess thats its limit

What happens when you run your main rig at the same res as the Htpc?

What max/min fps do you get?

EDIT:beaten to the punch :-)

Steffano2002

uberpixie wrote: »

EDIT:beaten to the punch :-)

LOL

L31mr0d

hmm... don't think my LCD monitor supports that res. But regardless, the spec of the main pc is leagues ahead of the HTPC.

I've a feeling that Crytek have been talking out their ass saying the game is optimized for x64, 4GB of RAM and Quad cores, as imo its making little or no difference.

uberpixie

L31mr0d wrote: »

hmm... don't think my LCD monitor supports that res. But regardless, the spec of the main pc is leagues ahead of the HTPC.

I've a feeling that Crytek have been talking out their ass saying the game is optimized for x64, 4GB of RAM and Quad cores, as imo its making little or no difference.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2219930,00.asp

8800GTS = 14 frames @ 1280 x 1024 DX 10

8800GT = 17 frames @ 1280 x 1024 DX 10

This is on "very high".

So 19 frames for a GTX sounds about right.....:rolleyes:

Play it on high i guess .

funnily enough when my friend saw the crysis demo, he thought Farcry on high looked much better than Crysis on medium :-)

papu

played through the game on the rig in my stats , all set to high Dx9 1680x1050

very playable unless 10+ enemies on screen...getting 25-29 fps constant

L31mr0d

uberpixie wrote: »

So 19 frames for a GTX sounds about right.....:rolleyes:

i'm not questioning the graphics card, i'm questioning that a different OS, RAM and CPU has had no effect on the fps.

Khannie

In your original post, the cards are both listed as the same. Anyway, the extra screen resolution brings with it an increased processing load that is non-linear. Also, if you divide 23 by 1.42 (the % difference in pixels) you get around 16, so actually, the main PC is performing quite well by churning out 19 fps.

The ram wont make any difference unless the game is actively using say 1.8GB or more (useless stuff would be swapped out to disk to provide the active app with as much ram as possible).

All in all, I would have expected it to perform better, but there you have it. Unless you can compare them both at the same resolution (hook up the main pc monitor to the htpc) it's not an apples to apples comparisson.

TheThreeDegrees

This probably sounds really dumb but have you swapped the cards around?
Could be one is on a different bios level or something.

As you are on the subject of Crysis which I have just bought but is still in its packaging cause I am afraid to run it on my current GPU,can someone answer me this?
What exactly is doubled if you bridge(SLI)two cards?

papu

TheThreeDegrees wrote: »

This probably sounds really dumb but have you swapped the cards around?
Could be one is on a different bios level or something.

As you are on the subject of Crysis which I have just bought but is still in its packaging cause I am afraid to run it on my current GPU,can someone answer me this?
What exactly is doubled if you bridge(SLI)two cards?

Sli and crossfire never really double anything in games

you might be lucky to get 30% or 40% at most with Sli

L31mr0d

TheThreeDegrees wrote: »

This probably sounds really dumb but have you swapped the cards around?
Could be one is on a different bios level or something.

both cards are identicle, they have the same BIOS version and are clocked the same

papu wrote: »

Sli and crossfire never really double anything in games

you might be lucky to get 30% or 40% at most with Sli

plus i'm wary to set it up in my main machine as I was reading it can cause stability problems with 4GB of RAM

conzy

Horribley optimised my bum!

It looks incredible! Like 2 generations ahead of anything ever seen before, and it runs on modern mid/high end cards like the 8800gt?

gtfo

uberpixie

L31mr0d wrote: »

i'm not questioning the graphics card, i'm questioning that a different OS, RAM and CPU has had no effect on the fps.

I'm just amazed how little difference in the benchmarks there are between the GT/GTS/GTX.

I am also very surprised that the 3870 performs better than the 2900XT?

Between your two rigs, dualie Vs Quad: was there any difference at all between the two regarding minimum frames rates?

Looks to be that there is very little optimisation in the game for anything other than a dual core CPU.

If you drop the settings to just high: is there any major difference between the two at all?
(that pretty much will answer it, I guess you found feck all difference?)

L31mr0d

conzymaher wrote: »

Horribley optimised my bum!

It looks incredible! Like 2 generations ahead of anything ever seen before, and it runs on modern mid/high end cards like the 8800gt?

gtfo

conzy, conzy, conzy... what happened to you? RTFM I'm not talking about how the game scales to different graphics cards at all. I'm talking about how Crytek have seemingly spent all their time optimizing the game around the graphics card and not bothing to concern itself with optimizing it for 64bit, RAM usuage or multithreading for quad cores.

I'm only seeing around 800MB of my free 3GB+ of RAM being used whilst playing. Sure all my cores have load on them, but around 10-15% only, and running the 32bit exe and the 64bit exe shows no difference in frame rates.

I wouldn't of minded all of this had Crytek not been telling people all along to invest in quads, loads of RAM and Vista x64. But they made promises and they've come up short.

uberpixie wrote: »

Between your two rigs, dualie Vs Quad: was there any difference at all between the two regarding minimum frames rates?

I set the res on my main pc to 1280x720 and ran the benchmark. I was getting an average 1 or 2 fps higher than on my HTPC which is frankly ridiculous. I put this down to the fact that 2 of my quads cores are barely being used and crysis is only using less than a gig of RAM. Crysis are touting theres a patch on the way, so maybe i'll play something else, like Blacksite: Area 51, in the interim until its released.

Also, for anyone interested. The single biggest killer of FPS is "Post Processing". I set everything to high which gave me a FPS of around 35, I then set each value to very high 1 by 1. With Post Processing set to high and everything else set to Very High i'm getting an average FPS of 25 now.

TheThreeDegrees

Are you saying the patch is for quads?
They already patched SLI.

well shhit anyways looks like I'll be looking at that unopened crysis dvd for a while yet.;)

astrofool

In Crysis you're graphics card limited, you could have a 3000ghz CPU and 3000TB RAM and you'd still be limited by the graphics card.

64bit, Quad CPU etc. will only make a difference in a non graphics card constrained situation, so either drop the res/effects a lot (you should then see a difference between the HTPC and main rig), or wait till more powerful cards are available

pred racer

I was going to get crysis, but having read this thread i'm thinking my c2d e6700 2Gb ram and 7900gto will sh1t itself if I try to play at any decent res,
what do ye think? should I wait till after my next upgrade? (could be a while)

conzy

Well at 640*480 low, you can get a few 100fps

You should be able to run it fine on medium at 1024*768 or 1280*1024 with a 7900gt

L31mr0d, try running it on both machnies, on low/medium settings 640*480

And your main rig should savage the htpc Its obviously limited by the graphics card at high / max settings

L31mr0d

conzymaher wrote: »

Well at 640*480 low, you can get a few 100fps

>_>

All i'm saying is, i'm a bit dissapointed that this game hinges so much on the graphics card when I have a plethora of CPU bandwidth and RAM space that isn't being utilized.

Plus I couldn't stand not having Post Processing enabled as the reason it slows everything down is that its basically all the bells and whistles of DX10 (i.e the god rays... etc) So I enabled it and am playing at a steady 19fps which, for the most part, is actually bareable. Most of the time i'm standing still, crouched in an eagles nest, picking people off. So there isn't a lot of stuff moving on the screen. Plus there aren't many big panoramas like in the benchmark, most of the time you are close quarters in a little shanty town punching holes in wall. I think its in these instants that the RAM and CPU come into use as I was monitoring the RAM usage and it jumped up to around 1.5GB in intensive gun fights.

EDIT: Also from reading around having more RAM doesn't actually help FPS in Crysis it just reduces or removes any stuttering caused when new parts of the map or objects are loaded.

conzy

it doesnt need the extra CPU power you have! So no matter how fast your CPU is you wont see a big increase in performance....

Put 2x 8800ultras in each PC and then your main rig will win.... Otherwise just accept that its GPU limited

Also is it just me or are low framerates more acceptable in Crysis than other games? Must be the ridiculous amounts of motion blur smoothing things out...

But although it feels ok at 25fps or so, its really hard to kill enemies at such a crappy framerate