[QUOTE="Phoenix534"]

Does this mean we're all just going to forget about Episode Three and assume their making a brand new engine?

Daytona_178

Valve has said more than once that episode 3 is still in the works, most recently earlier this year. I couldn't find the source if I tried by now, but I remember that I read it in an article on Rockpapershotgun.

Cool to see this, but I don't think I would ever use something like this. I think I'll stick to uninstalling the driver, restarting, running a driver cleaner, restarting, installing the drivers, and restarting, as I can't imagine Steam's process would never fail to completely clean up old driver files before installing the new ones. That said, I wonder how long until nVidia jumps on the bandwagon.

2142 was my favorite Battlefield game of them all, so yes.

No, I like them. I thought this topic was going to be about how the game becomes very linear and loses a lot of its sandbox gameplay at that point. I like all the levels in Crysis equally in terms of visuals. Though the tropical environments have the most flavor, the ice levels are generally more of a grand spectacle and are the best-looking tundra environments I've seen in any game to date (and though that goes without saying, tundra environments aren't typically something you see displayed in such grandeur in games).

Games have not always been $50, you know. I remember paying $60 for new adventure titles, or $70 to $100 for the CD-ROM version. And that was in 90's.

dos4gw82

Most old games weren't that much in my experience, though. In the early 90's, most PC games were $30-$35 (e.g., Bio Menace, Duke Nukem, each Keen game [which we now recognize as two games split into three episodes each, minus Keen Dreams], Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure, Blake Stone, Jill of the Jungle, Xargon, etc.), and later $40 (Doom, Jazz Jackrabbit, and a bunch of others I'm too lazy to go refresh my memory on). From there, the $40 standard for full price for most games stuck on into the early 2000's, around which time I remember full price increased to $50 standard.

Well. Seeing as how the PC will be the superior version, I do not mind paying $60 at all. I own consoles as well, and I would feel cheated if I purchased the console version for $60. Too bad though, I would still prefer $50 price tag. Saving money is always a good thing.Elann2008

Like I said in my first post in the topic, look out for places selling at a quote, unquote "discount" price of $50 like Amazon is doing right now.

I figured they would do this since they did it with MoH, and reception of that game has been far more lukewarm than Crysis 2's. Pretty unfortunate.

However, keep in mind you'll inevitably be able to order it somewhere "on sale" for $50. Amazon has the preorder for $50 with free shipping right now (though it doesn't stipulate that it's the limited edition right now, but I'm sure it will closer to release).

Are we really going to have this type of thread every time this happens? If you're not willing to spend the extra $10 just don't buy it. Again, I refer to how much games in other places cost. All of the games I buy at retail are normally $79 (au) and thats a discount!

biggest_loser

That just means Australians are getting ripped off extra hard.

Yea I'm talking about 16xQAA as well, everything turned straight up. I actually agree with fidelity:performance ratio but it doesn't help that the difference between very high and max is basically nothing but performance goes out the window.

Espada12

Oh, I see, that makes sense. Well, if by very high, you mean all very high settings without AA maxed out, and by max you mean with AA maxed out, that's how it is with AA. It's always going to have a pretty huge impact on performance for a smaller and smaller visual improvement as you increase it. I personally can't max L4D2 out with AA at 16xQ without a noticeable framerate drop when I have my flashlight turned on in most areas.

Are you actually dissatisfied with the performance you get in Crysis at your settings (meaning it's not as smooth and playable as you'd like)? Because if so, maybe you should try just lowering the AA some. At your resolution, you'll probably hardly notice the difference.

[QUOTE="JP_Russell"]

Because it just looks that good. Crysis is possibly the first game ever released to be so far ahead of the curve at launch, such that it remains what is generally regarded as the best-looking video game in the world even now, and it performs suitably for how it looks. This notion that Crysis should run so wonderfully maxed out at a high res today disregards (or at least, disagrees with) the logic that Crysis just runs how it should (albeit, for being a non-multi-threaded game, something that was standard in its day) for how good it looks. Modern video cards can't max Crysis at a high resolution with framerate that never dips even marginally because modern video cards are simply not powerful enough to render something with the fidelity of Crysis (unless you go above and beyond the standard level of optimization like Crysis 2 is supposedly doing with its deferred renderer and all that) with a beyond playable framerate.

Espada12

I disagree, it does not perform suitably for how it looks, unless I'm looking clear across the map there should be no reason why the game only averages out at 35FPS at 1080p while maxed on a 480GTX, there's simply no reason other than bad optimization, I agree that the game is the best looking game out and I do expect it to struggle with quite a bit of hardware but not 3 years after the fact. By the time a GPU comes out able to keep this game at 60FPS maxed, it will be 4 or 5 years after the game's release, does that sound reasonable at all?

How old the game will be is irrelevant to me. The fidelity:performance ratio is the only thing I consider to be important. In any case, we're going to have to just agree to disagree on that part. Most games I've played, both modern and old, perform comparably or worse at comparable visual settings, so I think its optimization is pretty standard. If the game were multi-threaded, it'd probably be beyond standardly optimized.

Also, when you say max, are you talking 16xQAA as well? Seeing as 35 is about what I average on my system at a resolution not much lower than yours (1080p is 1.08x the pixels of 16x12) with almost everything on very high, I'd be surprised at your performance unless you've got the AA way up.

Although I agree that crytek went far in terms of scale of the game and future proofing, poor optimization is part of the problem, how is it that 3 years after release there is no single GPU that can handle this game maxed @ 1080p and keep at least 50FPS constantly. That is simply ridiculous.

Espada12

Because it just looks that good. Crysis is possibly the first game ever released to be so far ahead of the curve at launch, such that it remains what is generally regarded as the best-looking video game in the world even now, and it performs suitably for how it looks. This notion that Crysis should run so wonderfully maxed out at a high res today disregards (or at least, disagrees with) the logic that Crysis just runs how it should (albeit, for being a non-multi-threaded game, something that was standard in its day) for how good it looks. Modern video cards can't max Crysis at a high resolution with framerate that never dips even marginally because modern video cards are simply not powerful enough to render something with the fidelity of Crysis (unless you go above and beyond the standard level of optimization like Crysis 2 is supposedly doing with its deferred renderer and all that) with a beyond playable framerate.

Neither. A 5970 should be able to run Crysis just fine maxed out - I don't know why that guy can't run it satisfactorily. I run it at 35+ average FPS (varies from level to level), minimum framerate dips no lower than 25, with everything on very high except shadows, objects, and post-processing on high at 1600x1200, no AA with the system in my sig in Windows 7 DX10. Same with Warhead (it's not optimized to run better [for the most part] so much as to render a tad more for the same performance). I should note that Crysis feels uncharacteristically smooth at any given framerate for some reason. 25 FPS in Crysis feels like 35 FPS in most other games.

There is one thing about Crysis (but not Warhead, as it seems to be fixed there) that is unoptimized, and that's shadows cast by loose objects in the game world. Anywhere in the game where there's a bunch of NPC's and objects around (the schoolyard in level 2, the hangars at the harbor in level 4, the initial outpost in level 6, the aircraft carrier), I get stuttering whenever I turn quickly or move around a lot if my shadows are set above medium.

It took me a while to figure out what was causing the performance drop, but eventually I noticed that turning anything but shadows down didn't remove the stuttering, while if I turned the shadows down to low (i.e., off), the stuttering went away completely, and was reduced enough to make the game playable at medium shadows. I've never had this problem anywhere else in the game including heavily forested areas with tons of shadows, so I presume it's just something about shadows cast by physical entities in the game world that's problematic if there are enough of them. However, I haven't ever had that problem at all in similarly populated areas in Warhead, so I guess they fixed whatever issue was there.

Other than that, Crysis runs very well for how good it looks.

You know, I just tried that game at 1920x1080 with 2xAA and though the performance did drop, it didn't drop significantly. It still ran smoothly at about 35 to 50FPS. That's pretty good, eh? However, when you compare the performance of Crysis to that of a game like Battle Field Bad Company 2, it is noticeably lower.

BluRayHiDef

On a quad-core or higher, perhaps, since Bad Company 2 is multi-threaded and Crysis isn't at all. But on my dual-core system, Bad Company 2 maxed out in DX10 looks roughly comparable to Crysis on a mix of medium and high settings to me, but performs worse than Crysis with everything on very high.

Do any of you agree that Crysis is still the definitive PC game? Even after three years?

BluRayHiDef

In terms of visuals, absolutely. To this day, the overall balance of fidelity Crysis has when maxed out is above everything else out there so far, in my opinion. Far Cry 2 maxed out on the PC is a fair contender overall, as are some others, but nothing, in my eyes, has matched or beaten Crysis yet.

Aside from visuals, well, I don't like to classify any one game as a definitive game of a platform, but Crysis is my favorite FPS to date and one of my favorite games of all time. I would certainly tout it as one of the most prime examples of a game built from the ground up for the PC, in terms of game design and ergonomics/controls and everything else.