Let's get something straight

User comments

by greensman @ 26 Apr 2008 20:33

Good for you Sammy!! Best lesson learned at an early age is money management and it sounds like your parents have taught you something for your future..... ;)
by sammorris @ 29 Apr 2008 19:46

So birthday time came, thought it'd be a nice opportunity to sort out my storage woes - HD753LJ on its way... With luck after that I can finally get a nice and organised directory structure on my server!
by Estuansis @ 11 May 2008 15:24

YAY FOR BEING GEEKS!!!
by sammorris @ 12 May 2008 11:20

Oho absolutely. :)
by Estuansis @ 19 May 2008 21:13

You may have saved all your money, but I worked my butt off to get mine. Every PC in our house was purchased with my own money and built by me. I am very proud of that. You have to realize how few people can actually do that.

We are both wicked nerdy and I am not ashamed to be a nerd. I love my PC. The satisfaction for me is not in playing games though. I get my adrenaline rush from high frame rates in very tough games. Crysis is like a double edged sword to me. I love the game and the graphical quality it can produce, but my painfully low FPS is slowly killing me :( Every other game made performs like a demon on my system, 8800GTX or not. :P
by sammorris @ 20 May 2008 11:21

Granted, that's impressive. Given I'm still in education though it's not exactly easy to get myself a job of any real significance other than over the summer. My satisfaction comes equally from playing enjoyable games without issue, and from pulling decent frame rates in them. To be quite honest though, I don't really give a damn how well my PC plays Crysis because I don't think the game's all that great, and even graphically it has some serious shortcomings. Its performance requirement is so ridiculous it's not representative of how modern games work. I take far more pride that I can max Assassins Creed and Call of Duty 4 at 2560x1600 than being able to max Crysis at 1680x1050 - the latter is even more of an achievement, but it shouldn't have to be.
by Estuansis @ 20 May 2008 13:14

I'll have to disagree with your thoughts on Crysis. I thought it was an adrenaline pumping thrill ride from beginning to end, even the alien ship was cool. Granted, there are some rough areas that really killed the realism of the game. I think if Crytek had more time to optimise the game and the engine, even an 8800GTS 320MB would have been able to nearly max it out at a decent resolution. Alas, I have to deal with FPS in the low-mid 30's with a less than satisfactory quality level.

You are right about other games though. CoD 4, HL2: Ep 2 and Assassins Creed look equally as impressive with much better performance. They don't offer the same expansive environments, but they are graphically equal to or even superior(in some parts) to Crysis. My main complaint for Crysis is that the foliage and lighting don't even look near as good as the pre-renders. Other games don't need pre-renders to generate excitement about the graphics.
by sammorris @ 21 May 2008 11:58

Opinions differ on games, that's fine. Crysis gets used as much as a tech demo as a game though, and as a tech demo it seems flawed as a final product - pass through certain areas of the game with scrutiny, past all the shiny high-res textures and then you'll encounter a rock which looks like something out of the original Far Cry. This discontinuity has occurred in several places - the most telling of which is how poor the flashlight effect is, near the beginning of the game. Even if the flashlight was meant to light up entire cities like it does in the game, it's not an convincing effect in the slightest.
I note that the Anti-Aliasing filters in the game are disabled for the foliage - presumably that would take too much of a performance hit on an already badly running game... As such even when you can get it to run well, it doesn't look its best.
by Estuansis @ 27 May 2008 2:04

Yes, the light beams from several sources are very solid and fake looking. They offer no dynamic shadowing or anything of the nature. This goes a long way in killing realism. A decent dynamic shadowing system would make enemy flashlight scenes almost scary and tense instead of just a dead giveaway. Also, running through vehicle headlights for the first time really bummed me out. I thought this was a simple thing to do in a game like Crysis. Even a far older engine like Source supports this feature. Half Life 2: Ep 2 offers fully dynamic shadows with all light sources, even the flashlight.

As for AA filters. If you use FSAA, foliage AA is completely disabled. I don't really care because, as you stated in another thread, the AA in Crysis is just plain terrible(even at 8xQ I still had loads of jaggies). I've found a satisfying performance/image medium by turning post-processing to medium, but enabling motion blur = 1 and useedgeAA = 2. There are still bad jaggies in some parts but the foliage(and some other minor spots) have almost none, which cleans up the image drastically. Motion blur is also a must-have because it makes even 20FPS feel pretty smooth.

I'm thinking an 8800GTS 512MB or a 9800GT right now. They both get much better performance with Crysis than my current card. I know you think Crysis is rubbish, but I still think it deserves a second chance when hardware is able to run it smoothly maxed out.
by sammorris @ 30 May 2008 20:25

I don't really think Crysis is rubbish, but I don't find it as enjoyable as other games. All told if I could give it the max setting and forget treatment I can give other games I'd probably not make such a big deal out of playing it, but the fact that I don't enjoy it as much as other games AND it's a paint to get running well just meant I had mediocre interest in it. Don't get me wrong, I want to play through it, but a little more fluidly. Because I hate the shadows in crysis (DX10 ones seem alright, but even at High, DX9 ones look very jaggedy and low-res) I turn them off by setting shadows and shaders low - the game actually looks if anything, better for it, and runs at triple the frame rate.
by Estuansis @ 02 Jun 2008 21:37

Then do yourself a favor and turn shadows to medium. The medium shadows look surprisingly better than the high shadows. No jaggies as the edges are blurred. Almost like cheap soft shadows. Weird, right? I feel that the shadows in this game are brilliant, but lacking. The shadows that do show are very detailed(even in medium), but it's the places where shadows should be but aren't. Like from flashlight beams and vehicle headlights.

And turning shaders to low really killed the game for me. If I had to choose a setting I'd go for at least medium. So much of the details and effects are lost when you turn shaders to low.